Tense and Implicit Role

Reference

Joel Tetreault
University of Rochester
Department of Computer
Science
Implicit Role Reference
 Verb phrases have certain required
roles – NP’s that are expected
 For example: “take”:
 Something to take (theme)
 A place to take it from (from-loc)
 A place to take it to (to-loc)
 Something to do the taking (agent)
 Possibly a tool to do the taking (instrument)
 Very little work has been has been done
(Poesio, 1994; Asher and Lascarides, 1998)
Goal
 Resolving IRR’s important to NLP
 To investigate how implicit roles
work
 Develop an algorithm for resolving
them
 Evaluation of algorithm for
empirical results
 Use temporal information and
discourse relations to improve
Outline
 Implicit Roles
 Annotation
 Algorithm
 Results
 Discussion
Example
(1) Take engine E1 from Avon to Dansville
(2a) Pick up the boxcar and take it to
Broxburn [from ?]
(2b) And then take the boxcar from
Corning
[to ?]
(3a) Leave E1 there but move the boxcar
down the road to Evansville. [from ?]
(3b) Leave the boxcar there.
 Statistics: Role
Distributions
Role Total Explicit Implicit
Instrument 25 6 19
Theme 40 30 10
From-Loc 39 13 26
To-Loc 27 20 7
Total 131 69 62
Corpus
 Annotated a subset of the TRAINS-
93 Corpus (Heeman and Allen,
1994)
 86 utterance task-oriented dialog
between two humans
 Task: move commodities around in
a virtual world
Annotation
 Used sgml style annotation
scheme
 NP’s annotated with ID and its
class (engine, tanker, location,
food)
 VP’s annotated with ID, event time,
and roles
 Roles for each verb are taken from
TRIPS lexicon (Allen et al., 2000)
Temporal Annotation
 An event time was assigned each
utterance, such as: t0, t1, u1, etc.
 And constraints upon the event
time are imposed:
 t9>t1 (t9 comes after t1)
 t9<t1 (t9 precedes t1)
 t9>t1 & t9<t10 (t9 comes after t1
and before t10)
Sample Annotation
 U1: Take Engine E1 from Avon to
Dansville.
 U2: Pick up the boxcar
 <ve id=ve122 time=t0 theme=ne12
from-loc=ne5 to-loc=ne6>Take <ne
id=ne12>engine E1</ne> from <ne
id=ne5>Avon</ne> to <ne
id=ne6>Dansville</ne></ve>.
 <ve id=ve123 time=t1>t0
theme=ne13 from-loc=ne6i>Pick
up<ne id=ne13>the
Statistics
 Most implicit roles have antecedents
found locally (0-2 sentences back over
90% of the time)
 Instrument: 79% Instr, 10% theme, 10% ID
 Theme: 88% Theme, 12% %ID
 From-Loc: 62% From-Loc, 38% To-Loc
 To-Loc: 57% To-Loc, 29% From-Loc, 14%
Theme
Algorithm
 For each utterance u, process u
left to right:
 If NP is encountered, push it on
appropriate focus stack
 If VP is encountered:

place all explicit roles on top of
appropriate focus stack
 If role is implicit….
Algorithm Example
U1: Take engine E1 from Avon to Dansville
Engine E1 Avon Dansville [empty]
Theme From-Loc To-Loc Instrument

U2: Also take the boxcar

boxcar Avon Dansville [empty]

Theme From-Loc To-Loc Instrument
Implicit Role Algorithm
 Type determines method. If role is:
 Instrument: search through current
utterance first for an entity that meets
verb’s constraints, else go back through
past utterance’s instrument and theme
focus lists
 Theme: same as above except search
theme before instrument for each past
utterance
 From/To-Loc: use temporal reasoning to
determine what order to search past To-Loc
and From-Loc lists for each utterance:
Temporal Algorithm
 For two utterances uk and uj,with k
> j, determine rel(uk, uj):
 If time(uk) > time(uj) then rel(uk, uj)
= narrative
 Else rel(uk, uj) = parallel
Experiment
 Developed LISP system that automates
the algorithm
 For each marked implicit role, system
tries to find an antecedent
 Notations:
 R-L – each focus list searched right to left
(order of recency)
 L-R – search is left-to-right (sentence order)
 Time – algorithm augmented with temporal
algorithm
 Results
Algorith Instrumen Them From- To-Loc Overall
m t e Loc
Baseline 42.1% 11.1% 88.5% 44.5% 57.1%

R-L 78.9% 55.6% 65.4% 22.2% 61.9%

L-R 78.9% 44.4% 88.5% 44.5% 73.0%

Time, L- 78.9% 55.6% 61.5% 55.6% 65.1%

R
Time, R- 78.9% 44.5% 69.3% 55.6% 66.7%
L
Total 19 9 26 9 63
Discussion
 From-Loc’s – naive version is better
 To-Loc – any strategy better than naïve
 Top pronoun resolution algorithms
perform around 70-80% accuracy
 Problems:
 Corpus size – hard to make concrete
conclusions or find trends
 Annotation scheme is basic
 Need to handle ‘return verbs’ properly
 Augment system to identify whether implicit
roles should be resolved or not (ignore
general cases)
Current Work
 Building a larger corpus that can
be annotated automatically using
the TRIPS parser
 Domain is much more varied and
has different types of verbs