Coverage and inheritance in the preposition project

Abstract

In The Preposition Project (TPP), 13 prepositions have now been analyzed and considerable data made available. These prepositions, among the most common words in English, contain 211 senses. By analyzing the coverage of these senses, it is shown that TPP provides potentially greater breadth and depth than other inventories of the range of semantic roles. Specific inheritance mechanisms are developed within the preposition sense inventory and shown to be viable and provide a basis for the rationalization of the range of preposition meaning. In addition, this rationalization can be used for developing a data-driven mapping of a semantic role hierarchy. Based on these findings and methodology, the broad structure of a WordNet-like representation of preposition meaning, with self-contained disambiguation tests, is outlined.