Beyond NomBank: A Study of Implicit Arguments for Nominal Predicates

Despite its substantial coverage, NomBank does not account for all withinsentence arguments and ignores extrasentential arguments altogether. These arguments, which we call implicit, are important to semantic processing, and their recovery could potentially benefit many NLP applications. We present a study of implicit arguments for a select group of frequent nominal predicates. We show that implicit arguments are pervasive for these predicates, adding 65% to the coverage of NomBank. We demonstrate the feasibility of recovering implicit arguments with a supervised classification model. Our results and analyses provide a baseline for future work on this emerging task.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Matthew Gerber, Joyce Yue Chai
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Computational Linguistics, Extrasentential Arguments, Frequent Nominal Predicates, Implicit Arguments