Possible semantic predicate issue with inquire-37.1.2

[jgung]

Inquire-37.1.2 includes a frame (8.1) with an example:

He asked him what to do.

https://github.com/cu-clear/verbnet/blob/master/vn-gl/inquire-37.1.2.xml#L330 Where He is the Agent and him is the Recipient.

However, the semantic predicates for this frame (and others within this class) appear to suggest that He is transferring information to him, instead of the other way around. That is, the person asking the question already knows the answer. I'm not sure what the proper fix is, so just bringing this up for discussion.

@jbonn @brownsw

[jbonn]

The idea here is that the information being transferred is the question, not the answer. There is an ongoing conversation about how to make this more clear-- at one point we discussed adding a [+question] selectional restriction to the Topic role, but I don't recall the outcome of that idea. Susan and I can revisit this tomorrow. Thanks for bringing it up-- since it's a question that comes up periodically, it definitely seems like something we should address!

Best,

Julia

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 9:37 AM James Gung notifications@github.com wrote:

Inquire-37.1.2 includes a frame (8.1) with an example:

He asked him what to do.

https://github.com/cu-clear/verbnet/blob/master/vn-gl/inquire-37.1.2.xml#L330 Where He is the Agent and him is the Recipient.

However, the semantic predicates for this frame (and others within this class) appear to suggest that He is transferring information to him, instead of the other way around. That is, the person asking the question already knows the answer. I'm not sure what the proper fix is, so just bringing this up for discussion.

@jbonn https://github.com/jbonn @brownsw https://github.com/brownsw

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[brownsw]

Hi James,

Yes, the semantic representation for this class is a little convoluted to think about. Because the event is one of 'asking' and not of 'answering', we've assigned the Agent role to the person who is doing the asking. The topic (or information being transferred) is the question. The recipient is the one receiving the question. The sentence doesn't tell us if "him" answers or not, so we didn't want to assign an agentive role to that participant.

Oh--I just saw Julia's response. I'd forgotten about the [+question] selectional preference we were considering. I think that would help!

Thanks for bringing this up. Susan

On Mon, Mar 2, 2020 at 9:37 AM James Gung notifications@github.com wrote:

Inquire-37.1.2 includes a frame (8.1) with an example:

He asked him what to do.

https://github.com/cu-clear/verbnet/blob/master/vn-gl/inquire-37.1.2.xml#L330 Where He is the Agent and him is the Recipient.

However, the semantic predicates for this frame (and others within this class) appear to suggest that He is transferring information to him, instead of the other way around. That is, the person asking the question already knows the answer. I'm not sure what the proper fix is, so just bringing this up for discussion.

@jbonn https://github.com/jbonn @brownsw https://github.com/brownsw

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/cu-clear/verbnet/issues/22?email_source=notifications&email_token=AHGDSY6V2POJEOKJQQGGSVLRFPOA3A5CNFSM4K7YADPKYY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFUVEXG43VMWVGG33NNVSW45C7NFSM4IRYA76A, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AHGDSY4TIR2HVXOE46XB4CLRFPOA3ANCNFSM4K7YADPA .

[jgung]

Ah! Thank you so much, Susan and Julia! That makes perfect sense and definitely clears things up for me.

Since the predicate representations you get are quite similar for e.g. "ask" and "tell"

Bob asked Alice about the game Bob told Alice about the game from my perspective it would definitely be helpful to add the [+question] selectional restriction on the Topic, or something similar.

Thanks again!

[jbonn]

I just looked at the xml for inquire, and it includes the +question feature! So, we did decide to implement it, it just isn't live on the website yet.

Julia

On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 7:10 AM James Gung notifications@github.com wrote:

Closed #22 https://github.com/cu-clear/verbnet/issues/22.

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