The Preposition Project

TL;DR

The Preposition Project aims to create a comprehensive database of preposition senses to improve natural language processing by better understanding their semantic roles and behaviors.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for disambiguating prepositions using a sense inventory and provides a publicly available database for NLP applications.

Findings

Disambiguated prepositions in FrameNet corpus.

Developed a framework for semantic role identification.

Created a gold standard corpus for preposition analysis.

Abstract

Prepositions are an important vehicle for indicating semantic roles. Their meanings are difficult to analyze and they are often discarded in processing text. The Preposition Project is designed to provide a comprehensive database of preposition senses suitable for use in natural language processing applications. In the project, prepositions in the FrameNet corpus are disambiguated using a sense inventory from a current dictionary, guided by a comprehensive treatment of preposition meaning. The methodology provides a framework for identifying and characterizing semantic roles, a gold standard corpus of instances for further analysis, and an account of semantic role alternation patterns. By adhering to this methodology, it is hoped that a comprehensive and improved characterization of preposition behavior (semantic role identification, and syntactic and semantic properties of the preposition complement and attachment point) will be developed. The databases generated in the project are publicly available for further use by researchers and application developers.