Million-scale Derivation of Semantic Relations from a Manually Constructed Predicate Taxonomy

We manually created a semantic taxonomy called Phased Predicate Template Taxonomy (PPTT) that covers 12,023 predicate templates (i.e., predicates with one argument slot like “rescue X”) and derived from it various semantic relations between these templates on a million-instance scale (70%-80% precision level). The derived relations include entailment (e.g., rescue X⊃X is alive), happens-before (e.g., buy X⇒drink X), and a novel relation type anomalous obstruction (e.g., X is sold out;cannot buy X). Such derivation became possible thanks to PPTT’s design and the use of statistical methods.