Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives

Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives Austin Blodgett, Nathan Schneider Georgetown University Washington, DC {ajb341, nathan.schneider}@georgetown.edu Abstract We adapt an approach to annotating the semantics of adpositions to also include English possessives, showing that the supersense inventory of Schneider et al. (2017) works for the genitive ’s clitic and possessive pronouns as well as prepositional of. By comprehensively annotating such possessives in an English corpus of web reviews, we demonstrate that the existing supersense categories are readily applicable to possessives. Our corpus will facilitate empirical study of the semantics of the genitive alternation and the development of semantic disambiguation systems. Keywords: Genitive, Possessive, Supersense, Lexical Semantics 1. Introduction Possessive constructions can be used to express a wide va- riety of semantic relations. English has two canonical con- structions for attributive possession. The first uses the clitic ’s or a possessive pronoun and is known as the s-genitive (or Saxon genitive): e.g., the car’s/its windshield. The second uses the preposition of and is known as the of-genitive: the windshield of the car. Both constructions are highly polyse- mous as to the nature of the relation between the two noun phrases. A few of the semantic relations associated with possessives include: • Alienable possession: John’s computer. • Kinship: My sister was surprisingly late. • Part–whole relations: The car’s windshield. • Thematic roles: The boy’s murder was never reported. (This is actually ambiguous: The role that the boy fills with respect to the predicate murder could be either agent or patient, depending on whether he was the victim or perpetrator.) Previous work on annotating the semantics of possessive constructions has taken a sense disambiguation perspec- tive, with semantic categories specific to relations between nominals (Badulescu and Moldovan, 2009) or s-genitives (Tratz and Hovy, 2013). In this paper, we show that a tagset for broad-coverage semantic annotation of prepositions and postpositions can be applied—mostly as is—to English pos- sessive constructions. We use the adposition supersense inventory (Schneider et al., 2015, 2016, 2017), which was designed with adposi- tions (including of) in mind, to annotate all of-genitive and s-genitive tokens in a 55,000 word corpus of English web reviews (§3). In so doing, we demonstrate that the existing supersense categories are readily applicable to English pos- sessives. The latest version consists of 50 general supersense cat- egories including thematic role labels (AGENT, THEME, RECIPIENT, etc.) and relations that hold between entities (POSSESSOR, WHOLE, SOCIALREL, etc.). §4 describes the supersenses that proved useful for possessive constructions. In §5 we examine their distribution in the corpus and their relationship to categories from prior work. Our corpus will facilitate the development of semantic dis- ambiguation systems, as well as the empirical study of the semantics of the English genitive alternation (i.e., what fac- tors influence the choice of ’s vs. of), building on the work of Rosenbach (2002) and Shih et al. (2012). As the latest version of the supersense inventory was designed to be cross- linguistically applicable, we anticipate that this approach will eventually accommodate possessives and genitives …

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