Towards a Domain Independent Semantics: Enhancing Semantic Representation with Construction Grammar

In Construction Grammar, structurally patterned units called constructions are assigned meaning in the same way that words are – via convention rather than composition. That is, rather than piecing semantics together from individual lexical items, Construction Grammar proposes that semantics can be assigned at the construction level. In this paper, we investigate whether a classifier can be taught to identify these constructions and consider the hypothesis that identifying construction types can improve the semantic interpretation of previously unseen predicate uses. Our results show that not only can the constructions be automatically identified with high accuracy, but the classifier also performs just as well with out-of-vocabulary predicates.