Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with ‘Dual-Life’ Nouns

Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Halima Husić, Johanna Poppek


Abstract
The topics of mass and count have been studied for many decades in philosophy (e.g., Quine, 1960; Pelletier, 1975), linguistics (e.g., McCawley, 1975; Allen, 1980; Krifka, 1991) and psychology (e.g., Middleton et al, 2004; Barner et al, 2009). More recently, interest from within computational linguistics has studied the issues involved (e.g., Pustejovsky, 1991; Bond, 2005; Schmidtke & Kuperman, 2016), to name just a few. As is pointed out in these works, there are many difficult conceptual issues involved in the study of this contrast. In this article we study one of these issues – the “Dual-Life” of being simultaneously +mass and +count – by means of an unusual combination of human annotation, online lexical resources, and online corpora.
Anthology ID:
S17-1023
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017)
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Nancy Ide, Aurélie Herbelot, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGSEM | SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
189–198
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S17-1023
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S17-1023
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tibor Kiss, Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Halima Husić, and Johanna Poppek. 2017. Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with ‘Dual-Life’ Nouns. In Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017), pages 189–198, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Issues of Mass and Count: Dealing with ‘Dual-Life’ Nouns (Kiss et al., *SEM 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/S17-1023.pdf