Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 2. A FRAME SEMANTIC ANALYSIS 44
2.3 A Sense-Enumerative Approach
One of the problems with using dictionary de nitions as the basis of a discussion
such as this is that it is not at all certain that speakers of English will agree on or be able
to access consciously such a ne categorization of meaning. Nevertheless, it seems useful to
create some list of senses as a starting point, which will be ne enough to capture most of
the important distinctions but coarse enough that people can generally agree (after a bit of
training) about which sense occurs in a particular sentence. Therefore, the more than 1,300
sentences containing a form of the verb see were extracted from the Brown corpus, and a
list of senses of see was created on the basis of intuitive judgements of these examples.
Then, my colleague Chris Johnson and I, working independently, categorized the
senses occurring in a portion of the corpus according to the provisional list of senses. We
reviewed together sentences on which ouranswers di ered, revised the list of senses, and
again independently classi ed another batch of examples. We continued through several
repetitions of this process, on the assumption that if we had listed all the major senses of
see and the de nitions were clearcut, we should be able to agree on the classi cation of
previously unseen instances. The result was a list of senses on which wewere able to reach
80 to 90% agreement on the classi cation of new instances.
As far as possible, the sense di erentiations have been made on on purely semantic
grounds, although we usually nd corresponding di erences in syntactic patterns among
senses; the complex relations between semantically de ned categories and their syntactic
realizations will be displayed in Table 2.2 on page 57 and described in more detail beginning
on page 55 and again in Section 2.5. Further analysis, to be discussed in the rest of this
dissertation, has resulted in the list of senses given below in Section 2.3, which isintended
to be the nest breakdown of senses of see that can reasonably be justi ed.
The limitations of simply listing senses are well known; Kilgarri (1997) criti-
cizes computational linguists for assuming the accuracy of dictionary lists of senses, and
Pustejovsky (1995:Ch. 4) devotes an entire chapter to the \Limitations of Sense Enumer-
ative Lexicons", focusing mainly on the fact that a list implies a number of senses stored
discretely. The only relation among senses which a list represents is a sequence with a
beginning and an end, which is certainly not the right sort; I do not intend to suggest
that this list is a good representation of how humans store their knowledge of the lexicon.
Nevertheless, listing a relatively ne set of senses (or \uses") will be useful in the following