Abstract
This paper examines the question of how a linguistic
analysis of a written document can contribute to identifying, tracking and
populating the eventualities that are presented in the document, either
directly or indirectly, and representing degrees of belief concerning
them. It is our view that the role of lexical analysis (as exemplified in
the research carried out in the FrameNet project) is greater than usually
assumed, so this paper is partly an attempt to clarify the boundary
between on the one hand the information that can be derived on the basis
of linguistic knowledge alone (composed of lexical meanings and the
meanings of grammatical constructions) and on the other hand, reasoning
based on beliefs about the source of a document, world knowledge, and
common sense. Since the general linguistic processes described in this
paper will apply to eventualities in general (by which we mean acts,
happenings, states of affairs, and relations, whether real, proposed,
imagined, or denied), our presentation will emphasize the linguistic
processes themselves. In particular, we show that the kind of information
produced by the lexicon-building project FrameNet can have a special role
in contributing to text understanding, starting from the basic facts of
the combinatorial properties of frame-bearing words (verbs, nouns,
adjectives and prepositions) and arriving at the means of recognizing the
anaphoric properties of specific unexpressed event participants, for all
parts of speech, in defining a new layer of anaphora resolution and text
cohesion. Using as a starting point the challenge text presented in the
call for this workshop, we show the points at which a thorough linguistic
analysis can articulate with the kind of simulation formalism demonstrated
in X-schema diagrams, which themselves incorporate a great deal of world
knowledge connected with the events introduced in the Hijacking text.
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