A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches

Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 599–622 May 2-6, 2023 ©2023 Association for Computational Linguistics A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches Annemarie Friedrich1 Nianwen Xue2 Alexis Palmer3 1Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Renningen, Germany 2Brandeis University 3Dept. of Linguistics, University of Colorado Boulder annemarie.friedrich@de.bosch.com xuen@brandeis.edu alexis.palmer@colorado.edu Abstract Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented. This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase. This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammati- cal aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminol- ogy. In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types. Aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially for precise reporting of the temporal structure of situations, and future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically. 1 Introduction Lexical and grammatical aspect play essential roles in semantic interpretation (Smith, 2003), and yet even state-of-the-art natural language understand- ing (NLU) systems do not address these linguistic phenomena systematically (Metheniti, 2022). Con- sider this example: an NLU-based personal assis- tant, noticing the boarding time of a flight, tells a passenger (who is still shopping at the airport) “You miss flights” (i.e. on a regular basis) instead of “You are missing the flight” (now!). The traveler might misinterpret this utterance as chit-chat and indeed miss the flight. Aspectual encoding errors impair fluid and correct communication. While there has been a notable amount of work on modeling lexical and grammatical aspect in the computational linguistics community (Moens and Steedman, 1988; Siegel and McKeown, 2000b; Friedrich et al., 2016; Kober et al., 2020), this area is still a niche in natural language processing (NLP). In this paper, we survey the state of research in this area and argue that a good computational un- derstanding of lexical and grammatical aspect is Tom is climbing. ongoing event, progressive, activity Tom climbed the mountain (yesterday). dynamic, completed event, perfective telic = has endpoints, accomplishment John is standing/stood on the cliff. no change, state At 4:07pm, Tom reached the top. punctual, change of state, achievement Tom climbs mountains. habitual Figure 1: Aspect is like the camera lens of language, the device by which we focus on particular phases of a situation (Vendler, 1957; Smith, 1997). paramount for capturing temporal information sig- naled by linguistic encoding. We thereby add to the on-going discussion in the NLP community about what is required to achieve true natural language understanding (Bender and Koller, 2020; Dunietz et al., 2020; Trott et al., 2020). When describing a situation, as exemplified in Figure 1, producers of language have options for how to depict the situation and …

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