Michael Regan


2020

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Representing constructional metaphors
Pavlina Kalm | Michael Regan | Sook-kyung Lee | Chris Peverada | William Croft
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

This paper introduces a representation and annotation scheme for argument structure constructions that are used metaphorically with verbs in different semantic domains. We aim to contribute to the study of constructional metaphors which has received little attention in theoretical and computational linguistics. The proposed representation consists of a systematic mapping between the constructional and verbal event structures in two domains. It reveals the semantic motivations that lead to constructions being metaphorically extended. We demonstrate this representation on argument structure constructions with Transfer of Possession verbs and test the viability of this scheme with an annotation exercise.

2019

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Cross-Linguistic Semantic Annotation: Reconciling the Language-Specific and the Universal
Jens E. L. Van Gysel | Meagan Vigus | Pavlina Kalm | Sook-kyung Lee | Michael Regan | William Croft
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

Developers of cross-linguistic semantic annotation schemes face a number of issues not encountered in monolingual annotation. This paper discusses four such issues, related to the establishment of annotation labels, and the treatment of languages with more fine-grained, more coarse-grained, and cross-cutting categories. We propose that a lattice-like architecture of the annotation categories can adequately handle all four issues, and at the same time remain both intuitive for annotators and faithful to typological insights. This position is supported by a brief annotation experiment.

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Event Structure Representation: Between Verbs and Argument Structure Constructions
Pavlina Kalm | Michael Regan | William Croft
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

This paper proposes a novel representation of event structure by separating verbal semantics and the meaning of argument structure constructions that verbs occur in. Our model demonstrates how the two meaning representations interact. Our model thus effectively deals with various verb construals in different argument structure constructions, unlike purely verb-based approaches. However, unlike many constructionally-based approaches, we also provide a richer representation of the event structure evoked by the verb meaning.

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CRAFT Shared Tasks 2019 Overview — Integrated Structure, Semantics, and Coreference
William Baumgartner | Michael Bada | Sampo Pyysalo | Manuel R. Ciosici | Negacy Hailu | Harrison Pielke-Lombardo | Michael Regan | Lawrence Hunter
Proceedings of The 5th Workshop on BioNLP Open Shared Tasks

As part of the BioNLP Open Shared Tasks 2019, the CRAFT Shared Tasks 2019 provides a platform to gauge the state of the art for three fundamental language processing tasks — dependency parse construction, coreference resolution, and ontology concept identification — over full-text biomedical articles. The structural annotation task requires the automatic generation of dependency parses for each sentence of an article given only the article text. The coreference resolution task focuses on linking coreferring base noun phrase mentions into chains using the symmetrical and transitive identity relation. The ontology concept annotation task involves the identification of concept mentions within text using the classes of ten distinct ontologies in the biomedical domain, both unmodified and augmented with extension classes. This paper provides an overview of each task, including descriptions of the data provided to participants and the evaluation metrics used, and discusses participant results relative to baseline performances for each of the three tasks.

2018

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AMR Beyond the Sentence: the Multi-sentence AMR corpus
Tim O’Gorman | Michael Regan | Kira Griffitt | Ulf Hermjakob | Kevin Knight | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

There are few corpora that endeavor to represent the semantic content of entire documents. We present a corpus that accomplishes one way of capturing document level semantics, by annotating coreference and similar phenomena (bridging and implicit roles) on top of gold Abstract Meaning Representations of sentence-level semantics. We present a new corpus of this annotation, with analysis of its quality, alongside a plausible baseline for comparison. It is hoped that this Multi-Sentence AMR corpus (MS-AMR) may become a feasible method for developing rich representations of document meaning, useful for tasks such as information extraction and question answering.

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A Rich Annotation Scheme for Mental Events
William Croft | Pavlína Pešková | Michael Regan | Sook-kyung Lee
Proceedings of the Workshop Events and Stories in the News 2018

We present a rich annotation scheme for the structure of mental events. Mental events are those in which the verb describes a mental state or process, usually oriented towards an external situation. While physical events have been described in detail and there are numerous studies of their semantic analysis and annotation, mental events are less thoroughly studied. The annotation scheme proposed here is based on decompositional analyses in the semantic and typological linguistic literature. The scheme was applied to the news corpus from the 2016 Events workshop, and error analysis of the test annotation provides suggestions for refinement and clarification of the annotation scheme.

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Annotation of Tense and Aspect Semantics for Sentential AMR
Lucia Donatelli | Michael Regan | William Croft | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)

Although English grammar encodes a number of semantic contrasts with tense and aspect marking, these semantics are currently ignored by Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotations. This paper extends sentence-level AMR to include a coarse-grained treatment of tense and aspect semantics. The proposed framework augments the representation of finite predications to include a four-way temporal distinction (event time before, up to, at, or after speech time) and several aspectual distinctions (including static vs. dynamic, habitual vs. episodic, and telic vs. atelic). This will enable AMR to be used for NLP tasks and applications that require sophisticated reasoning about time and event structure.

2017

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Integrating Decompositional Event Structures into Storylines
William Croft | Pavlína Pešková | Michael Regan
Proceedings of the Events and Stories in the News Workshop

Storyline research links together events in stories and specifies shared participants in those stories. In these analyses, an atomic event is assumed to be a single clause headed by a single verb. However, many analyses of verbal semantics assume a decompositional analysis of events expressed in single clauses. We present a formalization of a decompositional analysis of events in which each participant in a clausal event has their own temporally extended subevent, and the subevents are related through causal and other interactions. This decomposition allows us to represent storylines as an evolving set of interactions between participants over time.

2016

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Annotation of causal and aspectual structure of events in RED: a preliminary report
William Croft | Pavlina Pešková | Michael Regan
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Events