The Preposition Project
This work addresses the problem of handling prepositions in NLP applications for researchers and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing resources like FrameNet and dictionaries.
The Preposition Project tackled the challenge of analyzing and utilizing prepositions in natural language processing by creating a comprehensive database of preposition senses from the FrameNet corpus, disambiguated using a dictionary-based sense inventory, resulting in publicly available databases for semantic role identification and analysis.
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.