Venkata Govindarajan


2019

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Decomposing Generalization: Models of Generic, Habitual, and Episodic Statements
Venkata Govindarajan | Benjamin Van Durme | Aaron Steven White
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 7

We present a novel semantic framework for modeling linguistic expressions of generalization— generic, habitual, and episodic statements—as combinations of simple, real-valued referential properties of predicates and their arguments. We use this framework to construct a dataset covering the entirety of the Universal Dependencies English Web Treebank. We use this dataset to probe the efficacy of type-level and token-level information—including hand-engineered features and static (GloVe) and contextual (ELMo) word embeddings—for predicting expressions of generalization.