Sebastian Pad


2023

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Adverbs, Surprisingly
Dmitry Nikolaev | Collin Baker | Miriam R. L. Petruck | Sebastian Pad
Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023)

This paper begins with the premise that adverbs are neglected in computational linguistics. This view derives from two analyses: a literature review and a novel adverb dataset to probe a state-of-the-art language model, thereby uncovering systematic gaps in accounts for adverb meaning. We suggest that using Frame Semantics for characterizing word meaning, as in FrameNet, provides a promising approach to adverb analysis, given its ability to describe ambiguity, semantic roles, and null instantiation.