A Treebank-based Investigation of IPP-triggering Verbs in Dutch

gerundives for a total amount of some 12,000 non coindexed null elements
over some 38,000 Null Elements. This problem has also prevented other
attempts at producing a semantically viable corpus of logical forms directly
from a mapping of PTB, by a number of other researchers working in the
LFG framework, (Guo et al., 2007) and in HPSG and CCG frameworks, but
also Dependency Grammar as reported in (Nivre and Nilsson, 2005).
In Branco 2009, the author reviews a possible annotation process for a yet
to be constructed resource, which is correctly regarded, the “next generation
of semantically annotated corpora” (ibid.6). However, since the author does
not make any reference to real existing resources, the whole discussion
remains very theoretical. In a subsequent paper (Branco et al. 2012), the same
author presents a parser for the construction of what he calls “deep linguistic
databank, called CINTIL DeepGramBamk” (ibid, 1810). In fact, the authors
depict the process of creating a Logical Form as a side effect,
“As a side effect, it permits to obtain very important payoffs: as
the deep linguistic representation of a sentence may encode as
much grammatical information as it is viable to associate to a
sentence, by constructing a deep linguistic databank one is
producing in tandem, and within the same amount of effort, a
POS-tagged corpus, a constituency TreeBank, a DependencyBank,
a PropBank, or even a LogicalFormBank.”
This is clearly an underestimation of the real problem that has to be solved
when moving from a constituency structure-based representation to other
levels of representation, where additional information needs to be added, as
we will discuss below. In the two papers by Branco quoted above, the authors
never refer to existing Logical Form resources, as if there was no other effort
in that direction done and accomplished by others.
All these methods go beyond the encoding of surface context-free phrase
structure trees, to incorporate non-local dependencies. This option requires
recovering empty nodes and identifying their antecedents, be they traces or
long distance dependencies. But since PTB annotators themselves
intentionally refused to coindex all those cases that caused some difficulty in
the decision process, all work carried out on this resource is flawed,
semantically speaking, from the start. However, I must admit to the fact that
WN glosses are much simpler sentences in comparison to PTB sentences,
which even if taken with a word limit under 40 are still too complex and not
comparable to definitions.
In a previous paper(Delmonte & Rotondi, 2012) I revised the typical
mistakes present in the corpus and commented on them; I also compared
XWN with the representation contained in other similar resources. In this
paper I will limit myself to XWN and I will extend the previous analysis. In
particular, in section 2 below I will introduce and comment at length the
thorny problem of representing three-place predicates in LF. Then I will add
some conclusion.
2 The Problem of Three-Place Predicates and Their
Representation in LF
Logical Forms in XWN are graded in three quality levels: normal, silver and
gold; the same applies to tagging and phrase structure constituency. "Normal"
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