Automatic Animacy Classification

Samuel R. Bowman, Harshit Chopra

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    Abstract

    We introduce the automatic annotation of noun phrases in parsed sentences with tags from a fine-grained semantic animacy hierarchy. This information is of interest within lexical semantics and has potential value as a feature in several NLP tasks. We train a discriminative classifier on an annotated corpus of spoken English, with features capturing each noun phrase's constituent words, its internal structure, and its syntactic relations with other key words in the sentence. Only the first two of these three feature sets have a substantial impact on performance, but the resulting model is able to fairly accurately classify new data from that corpus, and shows promise for binary animacy classification and for use on automatically parsed text.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Title of host publicationNAACL-HLT 2012 - 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
    Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop
    EditorsRivka Levitan, Myle Ott, Roger Levy, Ani Nenkova
    PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
    Pages7-10
    Number of pages4
    ISBN (Electronic)1937284204, 9781937284206
    StatePublished - 2012
    Event2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2012 - Montreal, Canada
    Duration: Jun 3 2012Jun 8 2012

    Publication series

    NameNAACL-HLT 2012 - 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop

    Conference

    Conference2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2012
    Country/TerritoryCanada
    CityMontreal
    Period6/3/126/8/12

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Language and Linguistics
    • Computer Science Applications
    • Linguistics and Language

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Automatic Animacy Classification'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this