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Actions

Actions (or more fully, Action types) represent individual semantically disambiguated verbs. They are lemma-meaning units, i.e. one meaning of a specific lemma corresponds to one Action. Thus, we can have many Actions labelled "to see": one for "be able of sight, not blind", one for "go to meet somebody", one for "perceive with sight".

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

Introduction

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).
Morphosyntactic valency notation for Latin

In the field marking morphosyntactic valency, we use the following abbreviations and signs:

  • Numbers 1-6: cases. E.g. "1" means nominative, "6" means ablative.
  • Pipe sign ("|"): denotes the logical "OR", i.e. marks alternative morphosyntactic valencies.
  • Plus sign ("+"): denotes concatenation, e.g. "de" + 6 means: "with preposition de and ablative case.
  • Words in quote marks "": denote the actual words used in this valency, e.g. prepositions in this valency.
  • inf: infinitive.
  • 4inf: accusative with infinitive.

E.g., 4 | 4inf | "quod" means that in this actant slot, this verb can take either an accusative, or a sentence rendered as accusative with infinitive, or a clause starting with "quod".

Before assigning an Action the approved status, it should meet the following standards:

  • Its meaning is described in the detail field. (You will benefit from the use of printed or online dictionaries.)

  • It has the Action/Event Equivalent relation filled in with a Concept which has its meaning defined in its own “detail” field.

  • It has full information on the three valencies for each actant slot (including the explicit declaration of empty in the entity type valency, if no entity is allowed in that slot).

  • It has a reference to an external lemma collection ID (in DISSINET, the LiLa Lemma Collection).

  • If you have found a corresponding meaning among WordNet synsets:

    • It has the definition from WordNet copy-pasted in the detail field.

    • It has a Reference to this WordNet synset.

  • If you haven’t found a corresponding meaning among WordNet synsets:

    • You have defined the meaning yourself or based on dictionaries.

    • If there is any synset in WordNet which is a superclass of this (more specific) meaning, then an Action corresponding to the WordNet meaning is created (if Latin WordNet has it, then in Latin; if not, then in English), described, has a Reference to the WordNet synset, this and it forms the Superclass of this more specific Action you are working on.

  • There is no remaining error message from InkVisitor validation. These messages are often due to the string “empty” in a morphosyntactic valency field – remove this string, we are not using it any more. (But leave “empty” in the entity type valency, where applicable!)

  • All of this has been checked, i.e. it is not just a first draft of the Action that you still plan to come back to.

For something to be aligned with a synset definition in WordNet, it is not required that you accept its hypernyms or synonyms, just the definition needs to match.

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