Abstract
Humans create things for a reason. Ancient people created spears for hunting, knives for cutting meat, pots for preparing food, etc. The prototypical function of a physical artifact is a kind of commonsense knowledge that we rely on to understand natural language. For example, if someone says “She borrowed the book” then you would assume that she intends to read the book, or if someone asks “Can I use your knife?” then you would assume that they need to cut something. In this paper, we introduce a new NLP task of learning the prototypical uses for human-made physical objects. We use frames from FrameNet to represent a set of common functions for objects, and describe a manually annotated data set of physical objects labeled with their prototypical function. We also present experimental results for this task, including BERT-based models that use predictions from masked patterns as well as artifact sense definitions from WordNet and frame definitions from FrameNet.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.540
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6941–6951
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.540
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.540
- Cite (ACL):
- Tianyu Jiang and Ellen Riloff. 2021. Learning Prototypical Functions for Physical Artifacts. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6941–6951, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Learning Prototypical Functions for Physical Artifacts (Jiang & Riloff, ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2021.acl-long.540.pdf
- Code
- tyjiangu/physical_artifacts_function
- Data
- ConceptNet, FrameNet