A Linguistic Resource for Semantic Parsing of Motion Events

This paper presents a corpus of annotated motion events and their event structure. We consider motion events triggered by a set of motion evoking words and contemplate both literal and figurative interpretations of them. Figurative motion events are extracted into the same event structure but are marked as figurative in the corpus. To represent the event structure of motion, we use the FrameNet annotation standard, which encodes motion in over 70 frames. In order to acquire a diverse set of texts that are different from FrameNet’s, we crawled blog and news feeds for five different domains: sports, newswire, finance, military, and gossip. We then annotated these documents with an automatic FrameNet parser. Its output was manually corrected to account for missing and incorrect frames as well as missing and incorrect frame elements. The corpus, UTD-MOTIONEVENT, may act as a resource for semantic parsing, detection of figurative language, spatial reasoning, and other tasks.