A “nominal predicate” is an action represented as a noun rather than a verb – for example, “destruction” is a noun representing the same type of event that the verb “destroy” represents. Something can destroy a city – we can thereafter refer to that as “the destruction of the city.” Unlike verbs, however, nominal predicates can omit all mention of the events participants, leaving them implicit (“There was destruction everywhere.”) Machine understanding of texts still requires the ability to identify the implicit participants of a nominal predicate.
This project will seek to develop, combine, and improve new and existing machine learning models of nominal predicate identification. The training and testing data come from existing large English text corpora. This is part of an international collaboration with Prof. Vera Demberg at Saarland University, Germany.