QA-Adj: Adding Adjectives to QA-based Semantics

Leon Pesahov, Ayal Klein, Ido Dagan


Abstract
Identifying all predicate-argument relations in a sentence has been a fundamental research target in NLP. While traditionally these relations were modeled via formal schemata, the recent QA-SRL paradigm (and its extensions) present appealing advantages of capturing such relations through intuitive natural language question-answer (QA) pairs. In this paper, we extend the QA-based semantics framework to cover adjectival predicates, which carry important information in many downstream settings yet have been scarcely addressed in NLP research. Firstly, based on some prior literature and empirical assessment, we propose capturing four types of core adjectival arguments, through corresponding question types. Notably, our coverage goes beyond prior annotations of adjectival arguments, while also explicating valuable implicit arguments. Next, we develop an extensive data annotation methodology, involving controlled crowdsourcing and targeted expert review. Following, we create a high-quality dataset, consisting of 9K adjective mentions with 12K predicate-argument instances (QAs). Finally, we present and analyze baseline models based on text-to-text language modeling, indicating challenges for future research, particularly regarding the scarce argument types. Overall, we suggest that our contributions can provide the basis for research on contemporary modeling of adjectival information.
Anthology ID:
2023.dmr-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations
Month:
June
Year:
2023
Address:
Nancy, France
Editors:
Julia Bonn, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
DMR | WS
SIG:
SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
74–88
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.dmr-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leon Pesahov, Ayal Klein, and Ido Dagan. 2023. QA-Adj: Adding Adjectives to QA-based Semantics. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations, pages 74–88, Nancy, France. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QA-Adj: Adding Adjectives to QA-based Semantics (Pesahov et al., DMR-WS 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.dmr-1.8.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2023.dmr-1.8.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip