Lexical Pragmatics in the Wild: The Case of Complement Coercion

Frederick G Gietz, Barend Beekhuizen

Abstract: We inspect complement coercion sentences (she finished the coffee or he started a book) as a case study for modeling open-ended pragmatic interpretation. Existing computational work treats complement coercion interpretation as a task of choosing a single best-fit verb (she finished drinking the coffee). We instead present crowdsourcing and modeling data that supports broadening the predicted classes to better capture naturalistic interpretation.