A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches
This is an incremental survey paper for NLP researchers, summarizing existing work without introducing new methods.
This survey tackles the problem of modeling lexical and grammatical aspect in natural language processing by providing an overview of computational approaches and explaining key linguistic concepts, arguing that future NLP systems must handle aspect systematically for human-level language understanding.
Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations is presented. This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase. This survey gives an overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and terminology. In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity, habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of eventuality and situation types. We argue that because aspect is a crucial component of semantics, especially when it comes to reporting the temporal structure of situations in a precise way, future NLP approaches need to be able to handle and evaluate it systematically in order to achieve human-level language understanding.