94 - Decompositional Semantics, with Aaron White

In this episode, Aaron White tells us about the decompositional
semantics initiative (Decomp), an attempt to re-think the
prototypical approach to semantic representation and annotation.
The basic idea is to decompose complex semantic classes such as
‘agent’ and ‘patient’ into simpler semantic properties such as
‘causation’ and ‘volition’, while embracing the uncertainty
inherent in language by allowing annotators to choose answers such
as ‘probably’ or ‘probably not’. In order to scale the collection
of labeled data, each property is annotated by asking crowd workers
intuitive questions about phrases in a given sentence. Aaron
White's homepage: http://aaronstevenwhite.io/ Decomp initiative
page: http://decomp.io/