Damyana Gateva


2017

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Classification of telicity using cross-linguistic annotation projection
Annemarie Friedrich | Damyana Gateva
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper addresses the automatic recognition of telicity, an aspectual notion. A telic event includes a natural endpoint (“she walked home”), while an atelic event does not (“she walked around”). Recognizing this difference is a prerequisite for temporal natural language understanding. In English, this classification task is difficult, as telicity is a covert linguistic category. In contrast, in Slavic languages, aspect is part of a verb’s meaning and even available in machine-readable dictionaries. Our contributions are as follows. We successfully leverage additional silver standard training data in the form of projected annotations from parallel English-Czech data as well as context information, improving automatic telicity classification for English significantly compared to previous work. We also create a new data set of English texts manually annotated with telicity.