Actions

Actions (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. morphosyntactic valency,  which is a free text field defining the prepositions and grammatical cases, but uses a formalized notation (grammatical cases are noted with numbers 1-6, prepositions are in quote marks "", alternative is marked with a pipe "|"); and
3. semantic valency, i.e. what kind of role the entity occupying the given actant slot has by implication (e.g., the subject of the Action “to travel” would have the semantic valency C “traveller”).

The main benefits from valencies are that they:

1. guide coders in their choice of the correct Action (or towards creating a new one if none among the existing yet fits the syntactic and semantic definition);
2. allow us to implement data validation features in a data collection interface;
3. facilitate machine understanding of text, allowing semantic disambiguation of verbs based on their morphosyntactic valency (recognized by dependency parsing), and optionally, entity type valency (recognized e.g. through through named entity recognition).