Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge About Multiword Predicates
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human interpretation of natural language relies heavily on cognitive processes involving metaphorical and idiomatic meanings. One area of computational linguistics in which such processes play an important, but largely unaddressed, role is the determination of the properties of multiword predicates (MWPs). MWPs such as give a groan and cut taxes involve metaphorical meaning extensions of highly frequent, and highly polysemous, verbs. Tools for automatically identifying such MWPs, and extracting their lexical and syntactic properties, are crucial to the adequate treatment of text in a computational system, due to the productive nature of MWPs across many languages. This paper gives an overview of our work addressing these issues. We begin by relating linguistic properties of metaphorical uses of verbs to their distributional properties. We devise automatic methods for assessing whether a verb phrase is literal, metaphorical, or idiomatic. Since metaphorical MWPs are generally semi-productive, we also develop computational measures of their individual acceptability and of their productivity over semantically related combinations. Our results demonstrate that combining statistical approaches with linguistic information is beneficial, both for the acquisition of knowledge about metaphorical and idiomatic MWPs, and for the organization of such knowledge in a computational lexicon. 1. Metaphorical Multiword Predicates Metaphor is a powerful aspect of language, enabling creative expression in terms of familiar concepts, usually ones which are easily visualizable (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Johnson, 1987; Nunberg et al., 1994). Indeed, metaphor is such a central part of linguistic competence that many terms, especially multiword expressions, that are currently accepted as “regular” language have their origin in metaphorical uses (Newman, 1996). Some of these expressions are viewed as meaning extensions of their component words, which at least partly contribute their semantics, or a figurative version of their semantics. Others have become idioms with idiosyncratic semantics whose relation to their component words is not obvious (except possibly historically). In particular, it is common across languages for multiword predicates (MWPs) to form around certain high frequency verbs that easily undergo a process of metaphorization (Pauwels, 2000; Newman and Rice, 2004). In their literal uses, these so-called “basic” verbs typically refer to states or acts that are central to human experience (e.g., cut, give, put, sit). Their metaphorical uses yield a range of meaning extensions, exhibited in MWPs such as those in 1(a–d): Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it