Actions

UseActions (or more fully, Action types) represent individual semantically disambiguated verbs.

Three valencies: Entity type valency, grammatical valency, and semantic valency

Actions acquire three kinds of valencies per any actant slot (subject, object 1, object 2 – the data model is potentially extensible further, beyond trivalent verbs):

1. entity type valency, which defines which entity type is allowed in the given actant slot;
2. grammatical valency,  which is a free text fromfield https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uSoRuJuntczuatcp5jiihsPm-qgTufrUsybqayd06cQ/edit#!!!defining the prepositions, grammatical cases etc. – it is useful for the use of our Actions for machine understanding; and
3. semantic valency, i.e. what kind of role any the holder of the given actant slot can acquire (e.g., in our example, the subject of “to travel” would have the semantic valency C “traveller”, and thus, in a research-oriented data projection, Alice could be tagged as traveller, and we could find all travellers throughout the dataset)

Valencies guide coders in their choice of the correct Action (or towards creating a new one if none yet fits the syntactic and semantic definition). They also allow us to implement data validation features in a data collection interface. Finally, they are useful for NLP semantic disambiguation of different verbs based on their grammatical valency, recognized through dependency parsing, and optionally their entity type valency, recognized through some other procedure (such as named entity recognition).