Aspectuality Across Genre: A Distributional Semantics Approach

Thomas H Kober, Malihe Alikhani, Matthew Stone, Mark Steedman

Abstract:

The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing
textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and telic vs. atelic events, can be modelled effectively
with distributional semantics. We find that a verb’s local context is most indicative of its aspectual
class, and demonstrate that closed class words tend to be stronger discriminating contexts than
content words. Our approach outperforms previous work on three datasets. Lastly, we contribute
a dataset of human–human conversations annotated with lexical aspect and present experiments
that show the correlation of telicity with genre and discourse goals.