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PropBank: Semantics of New Predicate Types

This research focuses on expanding PropBank, a corpus annotated with predicate argument structures, with new predicate types; namely, noun, adjective and complex predicates, such as Light Verb Constructions. This effort is in part inspired by a sister project to PropBank, the Abstract Meaning Representation project, which also attempts to capture “who is doing what to whom” in a sentence, but does so in a way that abstracts away from syntactic structures. For example, alternate realizations of a ‘destroying’ event in the form of either the verb ‘destroy’ or the noun ‘destruction’ would receive the same Abstract Meaning Representation. In order for PropBank to reach the same level of coverage and continue to serve as the bedrock for Abstract Meaning Representation, predicate types other than verbs, which have previously gone without annotation, must be annotated. This research describes the challenges therein, including the development of new annotation practices that walk the line between abstracting away from language-particular syntactic facts to explore deeper semantics, and maintaining the connection between semantics and syntactic structures that has proven to be very valuable for PropBank as a corpus of training data for Natural Language Processing applications.