My Case, For an Adposition: Lexical Polysemy of Adpositions and Case Markers in Finnish and Latin

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 2610–2616 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 2610 My Case, For an Adposition: Lexical Polysemy of Adpositions and Case Markers in Finnish and Latin Daniel Chen, Mans Hulden University of Colorado {daniel.chen-1, mans.hulden}@colorado.edu Abstract Adpositions and case markers contain a high degree of polysemy and participate in unique semantic role configurations. We present a novel application of the SNACS supersense hierarchy to Finnish and Latin data by manually annotating adposition and case marker tokens in Finnish and Latin translations of Chapters IV-V of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). We evaluate the computational validity of the semantic role annotation categories by grouping raw, contextualized Multilingual BERT embeddings using k-means clustering. Keywords: corpus creation/annotation, evaluation methodologies, morphology, semantics, parsing, grammar, syntax, treebank, lexical semantics, adpositions, case markers, polysemy, Latin, Finnish, computational semantics, natural language processing, embeddings, k-means clustering 1. Introduction Crosslinguistically, adpositions are among the most polysemous word forms in a grammar. Polysemy refers to the semantic phenomenon where one form maps to multiple meanings that are interrelated but not necessarily synonymous. Because of their high pol- ysemy, a singular adposition can cover a wide range of semantic fields while occupying the same syntactic context. They describe both grounded spatial relations and abstract causal relations; they occupy both core1 semantic roles and non-core semantic roles. Adposi- tions cannot be trivially substituted for each other, and their lexical semantics are heavily informed by con- textual dependencies with their governor and object (Srikumar and Roth, 2013), or head and dependent. For case-marked languages, case markers on nouns can individually or jointly occupy the same semantic roles that an adposition individually represents in other lan- guages, such as English. Latin and Finnish are case- marked languages that use both adpositions and case markers, but in three different semantic configurations: 1) the case marker solely represents a semantic role (typically one of the case marker’s prototypical roles), 2) the case marker and adposition both represent the same semantic role, 3) the adposition represents a se- mantic role differing from the case marker’s prototypi- cal role: together they convey a gestalt semantic role. To account for lexical polysemy and identify semantic configurations of adposition and case marker tokens, we annotate semantic roles for those tokens using ver- sion 2.5 of the English annotation guidelines of the supersense hierarchy Semantic Network for Adposi- tion and Case Senses (SNACS) (Schneider et al., 2018; 1Core semantic roles fill argument structure slots of a main verb like give. For example, a prepositional phrase like to me fills the RECIPIENT role in the English ditransitive con- struction, as in “Give the book to me” . Schneider et al., 2020b). In this paper, we present a novel application of SNACS to Finnish and Latin trans- lations of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by creat- ing a pilot annotation corpus2 consisting of Chapters IV and V, two chapters that have existing SNACS …

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