A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches

Annemarie Friedrich, Nianwen Xue, Alexis Palmer


Abstract
Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented. This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase. This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminology. In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types. Aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially for precise reporting of the temporal structure of situations, and future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
599–622
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.44
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.44
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Annemarie Friedrich, Nianwen Xue, and Alexis Palmer. 2023. A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 599–622, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches (Friedrich et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.44.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.44.mp4