Logical metonymies and qualia structures: an annotated database of logical metonymies for German

Abstract

Logical metonymies like The author began the book involve the interpretation of events that are not realized in the sentence (Covert events: -> writing the book). The Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky 1995) provides a qualia-based account of covert event interpretation, claiming that the covert event is retrieved from the qualia structure of the object. Such a theory poses the question of to what extent covert events in logical metonymies can be accounted for by qualia structures. Building on previous work on English, we present a corpus study for German verbs (anfangen (mit), aufhören (mit), beenden, beginnen (mit), geniessen, based on data obtained from the deWaC corpus. We built a corpus of logical metonymies, which were manually annotated and compared with the qualia structures of their objects, then we contrasted annotation results from two expert annotators for metonymies (The author began the book) and long forms (The author began reading the book) across verbs. Our annotation was evaluated on a sample of sentences annotated by a group of naive annotators on a crowdsourcing platform. The logical metonymy database (2661 metonymies and 1886 long forms) with two expert annotations is freely available for scientific research purposes.

Alessandra Zarcone

Professor of Language Technologies and Cognitive Assistants

Computational linguist with a background in NLP and in psycholinguistics, working on AI, NLP and human-machine interaction.