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<Paper uid="C86-1004">
  <Title>A THEORY OF SEMANTIC RELATIONS FOR LARGE SCALE NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="20" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
(RECIPIENT (GOAL) ORIGIN)
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> To which of the two criteria should we give the priority? It is not so that the causer (agent) is always origin of some object trajectory as with 'to give'. As a matter of fact, the predicate 'to give' has always been used as a model (cf. the word 'dative').</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The causer may well cause that objects move not away from him but towards him, as with 'to take'. In general, we could speak of two different streams or directions, one at the spatial level (the location of objects),i another at the causa\] level (an influence going from one entity towards another entity).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> To ensure the self-consistency of a system we appeal to the following two principles: - we use the mathematical notion of relation: a predicate establishes a relation between pairs of units or one unit is related to itself by a predicate, - we use few clearly distinguished semantic units.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Some units are relators. They establish relations between other units. The relators are the predicates, the other units are their arguments. When we try to characterize the different kinds of relations, it is important to keep in mind that the arguments are related BY the predicate, not TO it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> we base our system of semantic relations on one semantic unit DIRECTEDNESS. The directedness concerns some object that may be oriented TO and/or FROM some other argument. The directedness may be situated at four semantically different, abstract levels: an influential, a locational, a qualificational  and a pertinential one. At three of these levels there is an additional non-directed relationdeg In the case of non-directedness the object is related to another argument that is semantically marked in the relevant dimension.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="20" end_page="20" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2o PRESENTATION OF THE SYSTEM
2.1o SURVEY
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The system we propose looks like this: influential: object orig.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> qualificational: object origo goal ref-term locationa\]: object orig. goal ref-term pertinential: object orig. goal ref-term The arguments of one predicate can have labels belonging to at most two dimensions: influential and one more dimension.</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="20" end_page="20" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
Examples :
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> He brought us a new car influential: orig. object iocational: goal object The car came from Paris \].ocationa\] : object orig~ In qualificational, \].ocational and pertinential, if \[he dimension is present, there must be at least one argument that is 'object' and at least one argument that has one of the three other values: origin, goal or ref -term. The dimension has no meaning un\]ess there is an 'object' related to at leant one of the three reference points, in each of these three dimensions an object may be situated on a directed line, i.e. with respect to an origin or to a goal or to both. Or it may be situated, without any direc-tional idea, with respect to a reference po:\[nt that is neither origin nor goal, and which we call just ref-termo She lives in Paris locational: object ref-term Ref-term is negatively defined as a reference point which is neither origin nor goal. It may be characterized positively, however, since a reference point, if it is neither origin nor goal, will normally be some noticeable object in proximity. This characteristic is important when we try to apply the terms origin, goal and ref-term in the non-locational dimensions.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> In influential, the argument that is origin can also be an implicit object, i.e. the influential relation may be reflexive: one argument is related to itself. Examples: She turned round influential: orig.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> She turned the page influential: orig. object</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
  <Section position="6" start_page="20" end_page="21" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
2.2. THE DIMENSIONS
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We use the dimension 'influential' to express an influence going from an origin to an object, as in the example just quoted. The concept of 'origin' at the influential level is close to the traditional 'agent', yet somewhat wider. It is not, as the latter, linked to the concept of action, but rather to that of causality. In every sentence there is an 'object' to which something happens, in a much smaller number of sentences there is an indication of what or who makes the thing happen. We need not always, however, fill out 'object' of influential, since it will be the same as 'object' in whatever other dimension is present.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> We use 'qualificational' to express relations between arguments some of which are not referential objects: IIe is a teacher qualificational: object ref- term She became president qualificational : object goal The arguments that are qualifications are easy to distinguish from other arguments by the fact that they cannot be referred to with a pronoun. They are not independent discourse entities, but they are attributes of some discourse entity.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We use 'locational', as already illustrated, to exDress spatial relationships, and also obvious metaphorica\] uses of spacedeg Finally, we use the dimension 'pertinential' to express more abstract relations. We take the Latin word 'pertinens' in the meaning 'concerning, referring to'. Thus the constituting idea of this level is just the idea of referring or relating an object to some other object. Defined in this way, pertinential can serve us as the unmarked dimension, i.e. the dimension we can use whenever the more narrowly defined dimensions do not suffice to describe the relations between the arguments of some predicate. In some cases a pertinential relation may be directional, namely when there is a precedence between the arguments: Peter suffers from pneumonia pertinential: object: orig.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The gun is used for shooting pertinential: object goal  In other cases there is no direction, but some kind of proximity (belonging-to, similarity or the like): The house belongs to Sara pertinential: object ref-term Peter resembles Napoleon pertinential: object ref-term</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="7" start_page="21" end_page="21" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3. PROCEDURE FOR ASSIGNING LABELS
A. IS THERE AN ORIGIN OF INFLUENCE?
IF THERE IS ONLY ONE ARGUMENT AND
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> the meaning of the verb implies that this argument is origin of a directed stream of energy, then assign the label 'origin of influence', else assign the labels 'object of influence': a. He works inf.: orig.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> b. The egg boils inf.: obj.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> IF THERE IS MORE THAN ONE ARGUMENT AND there is an influence relation such that one argument is directed towards another, then assign to the former the label 'origin', and to the latter the label 'object': c. He boils the egg inf.: orig. object d. She will soon come to Copenhagen (no assignments) e. They send her to Copenhagen inf.: orig. object f. He uses the gun for shooting inf.: orig. object g. We have no money (no assignments) h. He called him a fool inf.: orig. object B. IS THERE A QUALIFICATIONAL DIMENSION? if there are arguments that are not referential (i.e. they cannot be referred to with a pronoun), then assign the appropriate qualificational labels: h. He called him a fool qual.: ref-term C. IF THERE IS NO QUALIFICATIONAL DIMENSION,</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="8" start_page="21" end_page="21" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
THEN IF THERE IS A LOCATIONAL DIMENSION,
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> assign the adequate locational labels: d. She will soon come to Copenhagen locat.: object goal e. They send her to Copenhagen locat.: object goal f. He uses the gun for shooting (no assignments) g. We have no money (no assignments) D. IF THERE IS NO QUALIFICATIONAL DIMENSION,</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="9" start_page="21" end_page="21" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
AND IF THERE IS NO LOCATIONAL DIMENSION,
AND IF NOT ALL ARGUMENTS HAVE GOT
INFLUENTIAL LABELS, THEN
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> assign the adequate pertinential labels to arguments that are not origin of influence: f. He uses the gun for shooting pert.: object goal g. We have no money pert.: ref-term object In order to save space, we have not indicated all the cases in which assignments will not take place with the given examples.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The proposed system has been tested on the following material: examples of verbs from the different verb classes of tradition such as communication verbs, mental verbs etc.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> all Danish and French verbs that have different surface syntactic complement realisations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> - all Danish verbs and verbal nouns in a text on Information Technology.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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