Advances In Research On Semantic Roles

Especially in functional-typological linguistics, semantic roles have been studied thoroughly, because they constitute a good starting point for any study on argument marking due to their semantically defined nature. However, the very concept of semantic roles is far from being without problems, and there is still no consensus on how the roles are best defined. In this volume, the notion will be discussed from novel perspectives with the aim of providing new insights into our understanding of semantic roles. Two of the papers deal with semantic role clusters, one with semantic roles in verbless constructions, one with diachrony of semantic roles and two with individual semantic roles that have not been studied in too much detail in previous studies. The book may not offer answers to all questions the readers may have, but at least it raises interesting further questions relevant to arriving at a better understanding of semantic roles. Originally published in Studies in Language Vol. 38:3 (2014).

This volume presents research on major issues in syntactic theory within Role and Reference Grammar. This theory was first presented in detail in Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar [FSUG], and these papers represent both expansions and applications of the theory to a wide range of phenomena. The first section contains an introduction to the theory which is the most thorough statement of it since FSUG, summarizing the features of Role and Reference Grammar established there and developing new theoretical components and analyses of syntactic phenomena not discussed in the earlier work. Throughout the discussion features of RRG are compared and contrasted with comparable features of other syntactic theories. The remainder of the volume is devoted to detailed analyses of specific problems, e.g. control, case marking, in a wide variety of languages, e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Nootka, Mparntwe Arrernte and Turkish. Thus the works presented here illustrate well the strong cross-linguistic approach to syntactic theory and description in Role and Reference Grammar.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2009, held in Guanajuato, Mexico, in November 2009. The 63 revised full papers presented together with one invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 215 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on logic and reasoning, ontologies, knowledge management and knowledge-based systems, uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, pattern recognition, computer vision and image processing, robotics, planning and scheduling, fuzzy logic, neural networks, intelligent tutoring systems, bioinformatics and medical applications, hybrid intelligent systems and evolutionary algorithms.

The chapters of this volume scrutinize the interplay of different combinations of case, animacy and semantic roles, thus contributing to our understanding of these notions in a novel way. The focus of the chapters lies on showing how animacy affects argument marking. Unlike previous studies, these chapters primarily deal with lesser studied phenomena, such as animacy effects on spatial cases and the differences between cases and adpositions in the coding of spatial relations. In addition, theoretical and diachronic issues related to case and semantic roles are also discussed; for example, what is case, how do cases develop and what are the functional differences between cases and adpositions? The chapters deal with a variety of different languages including Uralic languages, Indo-European languages, Basque, Korean and Vaeakau-Taumako. The book is appealing to anyone interested in case, animacy and/or semantic roles.

This book is aimed at providing an overview of several aspects of semantic role labeling. Chapter 1 begins with linguistic background on the definition of semantic roles and the controversies surrounding them. Chapter 2 describes how the theories have led to structured lexicons such as FrameNet, VerbNet and the PropBank Frame Files that in turn provide the basis for large scale semantic annotation of corpora. This data has facilitated the development of automatic semantic role labeling systems based on supervised machine learning techniques. Chapter 3 presents the general principles of applying both supervised and unsupervised machine learning to this task, with a description of the standard stages and feature choices, as well as giving details of several specific systems. Recent advances include the use of joint inference to take advantage of context sensitivities, and attempts to improve performance by closer integration of the syntactic parsing task with semantic role labeling. Chapter 3 also discusses the impact the granularity of the semantic roles has on system performance. Having outlined the basic approach with respect to English, Chapter 4 goes on to discuss applying the same techniques to other languages, using Chinese as the primary example. Although substantial training data is available for Chinese, this is not the case for many other languages, and techniques for projecting English role labels onto parallel corpora are also presented. Table of Contents: Preface / Semantic Roles / Available Lexical Resources / Machine Learning for Semantic Role Labeling / A Cross-Lingual Perspective / Summary

Presents, in simple and clear terms, the way in which humans express their ideas by talking.

This book presents the first detailed and comprehensive study of information highlighting in advanced learner language, echoing the increasing interest in questions of near-native competence in SLA research and contributing to the description of advanced interlanguages. It examines the production and comprehension of specific means of information highlighting in English by native speakers and German learners of English as a foreign language, presenting triangulated experimental and learner corpus data as corroborating evidence. The study focuses on learners’ use of discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, preposing, and it- and wh-clefts, an underexplored field in SLA research to date.The book also provides a critical re-assessment of the study of pragmatics within SLA. It has largely been neglected to date that L2 pragmatic knowledge includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts. Thus, the book argues for an extension of the scope of inquiry in interlanguage pragmatics beyond the cross-cultural investigation of speech acts. It also discusses pedagogical implications for foreign language teaching and will be of interest to applied linguists and SLA researchers, language teachers and curriculum designers.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, language: English, abstract: The aim of this work on semantic roles is supposed to reveal that the English language needs another approach to describe the relations between entities, which are the predicate and the specific argument in sentences. This work is opened by an introduction, which is followed by a research report. In the report, a concise overview about the history of semantic roles and the development of this field of research is illustrated. Starting in the sixties of the last century, the most significant names, like Fillmore and Gruber, and their contributions are mentioned to depict the survey. Furthermore, the work is composed of a twofold perspective on case systems. The first one considers the German case system with some of its characteristics that are relevant for this topic. The other one is supposed to delineate features and properties of the English cases, which can be transferred to this issue on semantic roles. This approach allows a more detailed and structured view and therefore supports the understanding of how the English language is in need of a different description for its sentence inherent structures and relations. The author ends with a conclusion. The issue of semantic roles is a very significant one with regard to the English language. It has been established in the sixties of the nineteenth century as a counter approach to the predominant subject of syntax. As the case system in English has decreased over time, semantic roles are able to express relations within the sentence, which grammar cannot grasp.