How to recognize event nominals

[dan-zeman]

Part 3-1-1-2 of the guidelines gives driver as an example of a noun that is derived from a verb but does not refer to a process. It does not show the UMR annotation of the example sentence with the driver (2b).

Part 3-2-1-1-1 has an annotated example with teacher and while it does not say that the teacher directly refers to the process of teaching, the annotation still uses the process concept teach-01 to define the teacher, instead of using an entity concept teacher:

(p/ person
        :ref-number Singular
        :ARG0-of (t / teach-01))

Would the driver be annotated analogously as "a person who drives"? What are the criteria to decide when to use two concepts (person :ARGX-of (process)) and when to use a single entity concept? For example, businessman in Part 1 is annotated just with a lexical entity concept: (b/ businessman). Why is he not annotated as (p/ person :ARG0-of (d/ do-business-01))? Is it just because you don't have do-business-01 in your valency lexicon? Would the process appear in the annotation if the noun were derived from a verb that exists in the valency lexicon? (NB: The Czech equivalent of businessman is obchodník or podnikatel, both are derived from verbs, obchodovat resp. podnikat.) What about nouns denoting other participants of processes than actors? For example, Czech jídlo "food" is derived from jíst "to eat"; should it be annotated as "the thing that is eaten", i.e., (t/ thing :ARG1-of (j/ jíst-01))? And if so, should the English word food be annotated as (t/ thing :ARG1-of (e/ eat-01)) in order to preserve cross-linguistic parallelism?

[nschneid]

Czech jídlo "food" is derived from jíst "to eat"; should it be annotated as "the thing that is eaten", i.e., (t/ thing :ARG1-of (j/ jíst-01))? And if so, should the English word food be annotated as (t/ thing :ARG1-of (e/ eat-01)) in order to preserve cross-linguistic parallelism?

Not a UMR expert but based on experience with AMR, it does not seem practical to try to convert every noun-concept into an event. Food = thing that is eaten is too deep a paraphrase for AMR, because there is no morphological relationship (no shared root between "food" and "eat"). The English structure would therefore diverge from the Czech structure, where jídlo would indeed be decomposed with an event.

[dan-zeman]

Thanks. I agree that it does not seem practical. I mentioned it only because I wanted to know what the intentions of the authors of the guidelines were.

In fact, I am not even 100% convinced that it is practical to decompose every noun that is morphologically related to a verb; but it is good to know that this is what the guidelines probably require (if it was required in AMR, and the UMR guidelines do not say that UMR differs in this respect).

[dan-zeman]

based on experience with AMR, it does not seem practical to try to convert every noun-concept into an event. Food = thing that is eaten is too deep a paraphrase for AMR, because there is no morphological relationship

Hmm, it looks like UMR decided to go further on this front. I just encountered example (1a) in Part 3-3-3:

Unhealthy food.

(t/ thing
    :ARG1-of (e/ eat-01)
    :mod (h/ healthy
        :polarity -))

[nschneid]

Interesting. There's also

3-2-1-1 (6a)

He gave the cat some wet food.
(g/ give-01  
    :actor (p/ person
        :ref-person 3rd
        :ref-number Singular)  
    :theme (f/ food
        :mod (w/ wet)
        :quant (s/ some))  
    :recipient (c/ cat
        :ref-number Singular)
    :aspect Performance
    :modstr FullAff)

[dan-zeman]

I see. So that's another place where the UMR crew should make up their minds, @jbonn :-)