The IMAGACT Cross-linguistic Ontology of Action. A new infrastructure for natural language disambiguation

Massimo Moneglia, Monica Monachini, Omar Calabrese, Alessandro Panunzi, Francesca Frontini, Gloria Gagliardi, Irene Russo


Abstract
Action verbs, which are highly frequent in speech, cause disambiguation problems that are relevant to Language Technologies. This is a consequence of the peculiar way each natural language categorizes Action i.e. it is a consequence of semantic factors. Action verbs are frequently “general”, since they extend productively to actions belonging to different ontological types. Moreover, each language categorizes action in its own way and therefore the cross-linguistic reference to everyday activities is puzzling. This paper briefly sketches the IMAGACT project, which aims at setting up a cross-linguistic Ontology of Action for grounding disambiguation tasks in this crucial area of the lexicon. The project derives information on the actual variation of action verbs in English and Italian from spontaneous speech corpora, where references to action are high in frequency. Crucially it makes use of the universal language of images to identify action types, avoiding the underdeterminacy of semantic definitions. Action concept entries are implemented as prototypic scenes; this will make it easier to extend the Ontology to other languages.
Anthology ID:
L12-1222
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2606–2613
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/428_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Massimo Moneglia, Monica Monachini, Omar Calabrese, Alessandro Panunzi, Francesca Frontini, Gloria Gagliardi, and Irene Russo. 2012. The IMAGACT Cross-linguistic Ontology of Action. A new infrastructure for natural language disambiguation. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 2606–2613, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
The IMAGACT Cross-linguistic Ontology of Action. A new infrastructure for natural language disambiguation (Moneglia et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/428_Paper.pdf