Multilingual Corpus of Illustrative Examples on Activity Predicates (2024)

Abstract: The paper presents the ongoing process of compilation of a multilingual corpus of illustrative examples to supplement our work on the syntactic and semantic analysis of predicates representing activities in Bulgarian and other languages. The corpus aims to include over 1,000 illustrative examples on verbs from six semantic classes of predicates (verbs of motion, contact, consumption, creation, competition and bodily functions) which provide a basis for observations on the specificity of their realisation. The corpus of illustrative examples will be used for contrastive studies and further elaboration on the scope and behaviour of activity verbs in general, as well as its semantic subclasses.

## introduction the paper discusses the ongoing work on the compilation, analysis and annotation of a corpus of examples in several languages along with the challenges it poses. the task-specific dataset comprises examples of activity verbs and is tailored to serve as language data for contrastive conceptual analysis of verbs. initially, verbs belonging to six semantic classes were extracted (verbs of motion, contact, consumption, creation, competition, and bodily functions) from the bulgarian wordnet (bulnet), which were further manually filtered on account of their appurtenance to the vendlerean aspectual class of activity verbs. examples from monolingual (semantically annotated) and parallel corpora were then excerpted illustrating the use of the verbs in context. the verbs under observation are assigned framenet frames mapped to the relevant wordnet synsets. the main objective of our work is to construct a demonstration corpus of annotated examples illustrating the usage of activity verbs. moreover, we aim at: (a) linking various lexical, semantic and conceptual resources in order to provide comprehensive description of verbs; (b) partial (or full, in case of parallel examples) crosslanguage alignment in terms of verb translational equivalents based on wordnet, and in terms of participants in their semantic frames; (c) flexibility of corpus design to allow data from other languages to be added; and (d) flexibility of annotation to facilitate the expansion of the scope and variability of the examples in the corpus. at present, the corpus includes illustrative examples for the use of activity verbs in two languages -bulgarian and english. further work on the corpus will include at least two more languages -russian (a slavic language) and italian (a romance language). this will provide linguistic material for observations on both closely related and more distant languages. the methodology for constructing the corpus, the description of verbs and the annotation of examples is largely language-independent and can be applied to extract and compile datasets of various languages. the remainder of the paper is structured as follows. section 2 contains a theoretical overview of previous work. section 3 gives a description of the resources used in the study. then we discuss the linguistic data and the process of its selection (in section 4) along with some illustrative examples (in section 5). section 6 involves a description of how multilingual data is represented as well as some disputable points, and section 7 proposes an annotation schema with its main principles and steps. section 8 summarises the main findings of the study with a view to the future work. ## relevant works activity verbs are members of vendler's aspectual classification @xcite , where verbs are divided into activities, states, achievements, and accomplishments. this classification has been subsequently elaborated by @xcite and @xcite . they propose four key semantic features which define the scope of the aspectual classes: the classes of non-stative verbs are distinguished by: dynamism; presence or absence of an internal limit -"proceed towards a terminus" @xcite regarding accomplishments, and time limitation -"achievements occur at a single moment" @xcite ; terminativeness @xcite ; boundedness @xcite . the temporal limitation is often equated with the presence of an intrinsic end-point or an instantaneous climax. some verbs can be classified in more than one aspectual class depending on their use, for example some verbs can be both activities and accomplishments (e.g. walk / walk to the store), and states and achievements (e.g. the ambiguity of many mental state verbs such as recognize, understand, know). thus, the aspectual classes are considered at the vp level rather than at the lexical level, which means that the aspectual properties are expressed in a complex lexical, morpho-syntactic and valence-related way by the verb and its arguments @xcite . the class of active predicates are broadly described in the grammars of the bulgarian language @xcite . different types of verbs of states, processes, actions, activities and events have been the subject of various studies on bulgarian. @xcite offer a detailed ontological description of predicates and predicatives of state in bulgarian, russian and english comparatively, based on large lexical resources and corpus data. @xcite describes lexical-semantic groups of basic verbs of motion; @xcite examines lexical-semantic relations between verbs of movement in bulgarian and their metaphorical use in different functional styles; @xcite explores particular groups of motion verbs in comparison with english verbs. a semantic description of verbs of change is proposed in connection with their representation in the semantic frames of framenet @xcite . a classification and semantic description of verbs of contact has been proposed by @xcite . different features of bulgarian verbs and classifications have been proposed. @xcite describes systemic dependencies between predicate types, semantic roles, grammatical categories and grammatical transformations of verbs. @xcite offers a typology of bulgarian verbs based on their (in)ability to form diatheses and alternations. as far as we know, there is neither a complex research on the typology, semantic and syntactic properties of activities in bulgarian in comparison with other languages, nor a specific database with particular selection of activity predicates. in our work we step on the analysis of @xcite which is close to the interpretation of @xcite and @xcite who consider activities as a conceptualsemantic category, characterised by the following semantic features: localisation in time; change of at least one participant in the situation and activity. we also rely on the aspectual understanding of the imperfective verbs in bulgarian, representing the activity in its progress @xcite . ## selection of verbs as a first step, we extracted from the bulgarian wordnet (which has been developing as a parallel resource to the princeton wordnet @xcite ) all (single) verbs from the synsets belonging to the semantic classes verb.motion, verb.creation, verb.contact, verb.competition, verb.consumption, and verb.body @xcite . we analysed the verbs and selected only those that represent activities. the rationale behind using wordnet, and the bulgarian wordnet in particular, as a source for verbs selection is that: (a) we are able to extract sets of verbs from the observed semantic classes; (b) we have access to the lexical and semantic description of the verbs in the bulgarian wordnet; (c) we can also extract translational equivalents in other languages (linked to princeton wordnet) and further collect illustrative examples for their use in corpora. along with the semantic information, the bulgarian wordnet comprises also some lexicogrammatical information encoding the bulgarian verb aspect. using this, we filtered the extracted verbs and selected only the imperfective ones. then we selected manually the verbal set so far leaving aside the prefixed verbs, as well as those that refer to states, accomplishments, and achievements @xcite . the verbs that were selected refer to continuing activities, may have human or human-like volitional subjects, do not have a terminal point and a (tangible) result. more or less we step in the process of selection on the preliminary criteria offered in @xcite . for example, the verb write 'produce a literary work', which is classified as verb.creation, would refer to an activity (ongoing in the past) in example 1a, but also to an accomplishment (with a tangible result) in example 1b. in bulgarian, two different verbs would be used -a non-prefixed imperfective one пиша (example 1c) and the prefixed perfective verbs напиша (example 1d). ## selection of illustrative examples the verbs are used to automatically extract examples from: (i) semantically annotated corpora and (ii) parallel corpora with no semantic annotation. from semantically annotated corpora we have extracted automatically examples using the predetermined verb set. the verbs are disambiguated, and assigned a particular wordnet sense (see section 4). example 2 shows two sentences from semantically annotated corpora showing two words belonging to the same wordnet sense. from parallel corpora with no semantic annotation, we extract bulgarian examples containing verbs from the predetermined set with all their possible wordnet senses, which are then aligned to a sentence in the other language (english) in which the verb is also identified. example 3 shows two aligned parallel sentences; all possible senses of the identified bulgarian verb are given; for each of the possible senses it is checked whether the english verb can be found among the literals of that synset, and in this way the most likely candidate sense(s) are identified. ## challenges in the process of selection the main challenge was, first, to differentiate between the different senses of the verb, which in some cases are very close (example 4), and second, to distinguish activities and accomplishments and achievements with verbs that select direct configuration of arguments or arguments with particular semantic characteristics (example 5). some verbs may be categorised differently with respect to the intentional elements -such as плача 'to cry', which can refer to a non-intentional, as well as to an intentional act. a. bg: през целия си живот си тър-сил това съкровище, само за да получиш уважението на историците. b. en: you've spent your entire life searching for this treasure, only to have the respect of the historical community. possible wordnet senses: # eng-30-01317533-v / търся / verb.contact / 'go in search of or hunt for' # eng-30-01315613-v / търся / verb.contact / 'try to locate or discover, or try to establish the existence of' (5) examples from bulenac for verbs in aligned parallel sentences with several possible closely related wordnet senses. a. since he couldn't sleep anyway, he might as well stand their watches for them or write their reports. (telic, thus classified as an accomplishment) b. all his life her father was writing poems and novels. (generalised atelic; or telic + iterative) c. in his poems he wrote about the beauty of the countryside. wordnet synset: eng-30-01698271-v / write / verb.creation / 'produce a literary work' in addition, mismatches are observed in the extracted parallel examples on various levels as illustrated in the examples below. (6) example from bulenac for verbs in aligned parallel sentences with mismatch in translation. a. we're not even out. b. дори не се разхождаме. 'we do not even walk around.' (7) example from the russian-bulgarian parallel corpus within rusnc 5 for verbs in aligned parallel sentences with different verbs. the example was extracted manually. a. ru: внизу проплывали игрушки-парусники… (alexander belyaev. the ruler of the world. russian edition: 1940. b. bg: отдолу плаваха играчки платноходки. (bulgarian translation: 1988, trans. by assen trayanov) 'toy sailboats floated from below...' this initial work on data selection served as a starting point for laying out the theoretical basis in determining the scope of activity predicates, their specific features and the possible approaches for the distinction between different senses of a verb with a view to its realisation in text. ## proposed annotation schema the corpora used for extracting examples are supplied with basic annotation such as sentence splitting, pos tagging, lemmatisation, performed for both english and bulgarian @xcite . the annotation aims at identification and description of the following syntactic components: (a) the verb, its wordnet sense, and the semantic frame it evokes; (b) noun phrases matched to frame elements and serving as external argument (np.ext) or direct object (np.obj); (c) prepositional phrases (pp) matched to frame elements; (d) subordinate clauses marked with different conjunctions, direct quotes usually marked using punctuation, and other lexical elements that realise frame elements. in particular, as a minimum we aim to identify and annotate core frame elements, but in some cases non-core frame elements which are essential for the interpretation of the verb, are also annotated (e.g., when an element is essential to distinguish a verb as an activity rather than other aspectual class). here we present the main principles and steps for the annotation of the illustrative corpus of examples which aim to ensure the consistency of the annotation as well as the flexibility allowing for its expansion in terms of including more languages, more examples and more levels of annotation. the annotation is ongoing. ## applications and future work the corpus aims at providing illustrative examples for the usage of activity verbs -a large and diverse class of verb predicates which shows various specific characteristics in contrast to other aspectual classes. further, the aspectual properties of many verbs are not realised on the lexical level (in the lexical meaning) but within the larger unit (as in vp). thus, the corpus will be a useful source of examples for studying the syntactic realisation of activity verbs. the work on the corpus demonstrates the principles of information transfer: (a) by linking different resources in terms of scope, coverage, description layers, granularity of semantic categories, to provide a basis for comprehensive description of verb semantics; and (b) across languages to facilitate the development of resources and language processing tools for low-resourced languages such as bulgarian. moreover, the corpus can be used to study the syntax and valence patterns across languages, thus facilitating comparative studies on conceptual structure. the corpus will provide empirical material for the comparative study between languages with lexical aspect (such as bulgarian, russian and other slavic languages) and those without lexical aspect (such as english). the flexible structure and the annotation scheme allow the corpus to be expanded with more examples, languages and annotation. the collection of parallel data of activity predicates is aimed at abstract ontological description and will allow the comparison of the features of conceptualisation, lexicalisation and grammaticalisation of activities in bulgarian and other languages. the parallel collection will be used for theoretical comparison in the conceptualisation of different types of activities that correlate with the grammatical structure in individual languages. this will make possible the typological description of activity predicates and the highlighting of language-specific and universal features at the semantic and syntactic level.