Decomposing Generalization: Models of Generic, Habitual and Episodic Statements
Published
2019-09-11
Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan
,
Benjamin Van Durme
,
Aaron Steven White
Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan
University of Rochester
Benjamin Van Durme
Johns Hopkins University
Aaron Steven White
University of Rochester
Abstract
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.