My research is mostly in the areas of typology, morphosyntax, and semantics. My work focuses on verbal semantics, argument structure, and argument structure alternations in a cross-linguistic perspective. I'm also involved in computational linguistics research as part of the Uniform Meaning Representation project. Supervisors: William Croft
Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop, 2021
Computational resources such as semantically annotated corpora can play an important role in enab... more Computational resources such as semantically annotated corpora can play an important role in enabling speakers of indigenous minority languages to participate in government, education, and other domains of public life in their own language. However, many languages - mainly those with small native speaker populations and without written traditions - have little to no digital support. One hurdle in creating such resources is that for many languages, few speakers would be capable of annotating texts - a task which requires literacy and some linguistic training - and that these experts' time is typically in high demand for language planning work. This paper assesses whether typologically trained non-speakers of an indigenous language can feasibly perform semantic annotation using Uniform Meaning Representations, thus allowing for the creation of computational materials without putting further strain on community resources.
This paper extends Croft’s theory of argument realization to include nominals that denote events,... more This paper extends Croft’s theory of argument realization to include nominals that denote events, instead of participants. Events are represented as force dynamic interactions between participants and their subevents. That is, each participant is associated with its own subevent; participants are related to each other through force dynamic interactions as part of a causal chain (Croft 2012). There is extensive cross-linguistic evidence that a participant’s place in the causal chain determines its argument realization. In this paper, we tested three hypotheses about the argument realization of event nominals against English sentences from VerbNet. First, we define an event nominal as any nominal that refers to an event, regardless of whether it is morpho-syntactically derived from a verb. Our three hypotheses are (i) event nominals correspond to participant subevents, (ii) event nominals follow the same argument realization rules as their associated participant, and (iii) when both a...
In this paper we present Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a meaning representation designed ... more In this paper we present Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a meaning representation designed to annotate the semantic content of a text. UMR is primarily based on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), an annotation framework initially designed for English, but also draws from other meaning representations. UMR extends AMR to other languages, particularly morphologically complex, low-resource languages. UMR also adds features to AMR that are critical to semantic interpretation and enhances AMR by proposing a companion document-level representation that captures linguistic phenomena such as coreference as well as temporal and modal dependencies that potentially go beyond sentence boundaries.
This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the antipassive within the framework of R... more This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the antipassive within the framework of Radical Construction Grammar. Based on function, this study identifies constructions in 70 languages from 25 language families and four geographical macro areas. Iconically motivated correlations were found between functions and the morphosyntactic strategies they employ. The results of this study suggest that constructions indicating the lower individuation of patients and constructions indicating the lower affectedness of patients, previously grouped together as ‘antipassive’, should be considered two separate construction types. This is based on their separate functions, the distinct morphosyntactic strategies used to encode them across languages, and differences in productivity with regard to semantic classes of verbs.
The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding (AAAI Technical Report SS-17-02), 2017
Charles Fillmore developed both the theory of construction grammar and the theory of frame semant... more Charles Fillmore developed both the theory of construction grammar and the theory of frame semantics. Fillmore's original frame semantic model included broad frames such as Commercial Transaction and Risk. FrameNet II (the current incarnation) has a complex lattice of frame-to-frame relations, in which the original frames are often abstract frames, and/or have been decomposed into distinct concrete frames. The frame-to-frame relations are of different types beyond simple taxonomic relations. The concrete frames are often more restricted in their argument structure construction possibilities than the original, more general frames. We argue that some frame-to-frame relations effectively represent the internal structure of the core events in the frame; the event structures are associated with different argument structure constructions. Introducing event structure into the frame semantic representation offers the potential to simplify the FrameNet lattice. Brief analyses of the Commercial Transaction and Risk frames are presented.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations, 2020
This paper presents a "road map" for the annotation of semantic categories in typologically diver... more This paper presents a "road map" for the annotation of semantic categories in typologically diverse languages, with potentially few linguistic resources, and often no existing computational resources. Past semantic annotation efforts have focused largely on high-resource languages, or relatively low-resource languages with a large number of native speakers. However, there are certain typological traits, namely the synthesis of multiple concepts into a single word, that are more common in languages with a smaller speech community. For example, what is expressed as a sentence in a more analytic language like English, may be expressed as a single word in a more synthetic language like Arapaho. This paper proposes solutions for annotating analytic and synthetic languages in a comparable way based on existing typological research, and introduces a road map for the annotation of languages with a dearth of resources.
Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop, 2021
Computational resources such as semantically annotated corpora can play an important role in enab... more Computational resources such as semantically annotated corpora can play an important role in enabling speakers of indigenous minority languages to participate in government, education, and other domains of public life in their own language. However, many languages - mainly those with small native speaker populations and without written traditions - have little to no digital support. One hurdle in creating such resources is that for many languages, few speakers would be capable of annotating texts - a task which requires literacy and some linguistic training - and that these experts' time is typically in high demand for language planning work. This paper assesses whether typologically trained non-speakers of an indigenous language can feasibly perform semantic annotation using Uniform Meaning Representations, thus allowing for the creation of computational materials without putting further strain on community resources.
This paper extends Croft’s theory of argument realization to include nominals that denote events,... more This paper extends Croft’s theory of argument realization to include nominals that denote events, instead of participants. Events are represented as force dynamic interactions between participants and their subevents. That is, each participant is associated with its own subevent; participants are related to each other through force dynamic interactions as part of a causal chain (Croft 2012). There is extensive cross-linguistic evidence that a participant’s place in the causal chain determines its argument realization. In this paper, we tested three hypotheses about the argument realization of event nominals against English sentences from VerbNet. First, we define an event nominal as any nominal that refers to an event, regardless of whether it is morpho-syntactically derived from a verb. Our three hypotheses are (i) event nominals correspond to participant subevents, (ii) event nominals follow the same argument realization rules as their associated participant, and (iii) when both a...
In this paper we present Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a meaning representation designed ... more In this paper we present Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR), a meaning representation designed to annotate the semantic content of a text. UMR is primarily based on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), an annotation framework initially designed for English, but also draws from other meaning representations. UMR extends AMR to other languages, particularly morphologically complex, low-resource languages. UMR also adds features to AMR that are critical to semantic interpretation and enhances AMR by proposing a companion document-level representation that captures linguistic phenomena such as coreference as well as temporal and modal dependencies that potentially go beyond sentence boundaries.
This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the antipassive within the framework of R... more This paper presents a cross-linguistic investigation of the antipassive within the framework of Radical Construction Grammar. Based on function, this study identifies constructions in 70 languages from 25 language families and four geographical macro areas. Iconically motivated correlations were found between functions and the morphosyntactic strategies they employ. The results of this study suggest that constructions indicating the lower individuation of patients and constructions indicating the lower affectedness of patients, previously grouped together as ‘antipassive’, should be considered two separate construction types. This is based on their separate functions, the distinct morphosyntactic strategies used to encode them across languages, and differences in productivity with regard to semantic classes of verbs.
The AAAI 2017 Spring Symposium on Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding (AAAI Technical Report SS-17-02), 2017
Charles Fillmore developed both the theory of construction grammar and the theory of frame semant... more Charles Fillmore developed both the theory of construction grammar and the theory of frame semantics. Fillmore's original frame semantic model included broad frames such as Commercial Transaction and Risk. FrameNet II (the current incarnation) has a complex lattice of frame-to-frame relations, in which the original frames are often abstract frames, and/or have been decomposed into distinct concrete frames. The frame-to-frame relations are of different types beyond simple taxonomic relations. The concrete frames are often more restricted in their argument structure construction possibilities than the original, more general frames. We argue that some frame-to-frame relations effectively represent the internal structure of the core events in the frame; the event structures are associated with different argument structure constructions. Introducing event structure into the frame semantic representation offers the potential to simplify the FrameNet lattice. Brief analyses of the Commercial Transaction and Risk frames are presented.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations, 2020
This paper presents a "road map" for the annotation of semantic categories in typologically diver... more This paper presents a "road map" for the annotation of semantic categories in typologically diverse languages, with potentially few linguistic resources, and often no existing computational resources. Past semantic annotation efforts have focused largely on high-resource languages, or relatively low-resource languages with a large number of native speakers. However, there are certain typological traits, namely the synthesis of multiple concepts into a single word, that are more common in languages with a smaller speech community. For example, what is expressed as a sentence in a more analytic language like English, may be expressed as a single word in a more synthetic language like Arapaho. This paper proposes solutions for annotating analytic and synthetic languages in a comparable way based on existing typological research, and introduces a road map for the annotation of languages with a dearth of resources.
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