Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

Abstract

We adapt an approach to annotating the semantics of adpositions to also include English possessives, showing that the supersense inventory of Schneider et al. (2017) works for the genitive ’s clitic and possessive pronouns as well as prepositional of. By comprehensively annotating such possessives in an English corpus of web reviews, we demonstrate that the existing supersense categories are readily applicable to possessives. Our corpus will facilitate empirical study of the semantics of the genitive alternation and the development of semantic disambiguation systems.