---
title: "Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives — Blodgett 2018"
description: "Blodgett and Schneider ask whether a semantic label set built for prepositions and postpositions can… 21 references, cited by 6 papers here."
authors: ["Austin Blodgett", "Nathan Schneider"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L18-1242/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/blodgett-2018-semantic-supersenses-english-possessives/"
---
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# Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives

**Authors:** [Austin Blodgett](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/austin-blodgett/) and [Nathan Schneider](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nathan-schneider/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/) ([LREC 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/2018/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1242/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1242.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2805741251)

**Citations:** 13 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [6](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/blodgett-2018-semantic-supersenses-english-possessives/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Blodgett and Schneider ask whether a semantic label set built for prepositions and postpositions can also describe English possessives. They cover three forms: the 's clitic, possessive pronouns, and the of-genitive. Earlier work used special inventories for noun–noun relations or for the s-genitive only. This paper instead reuses the adposition supersense hierarchy of Schneider et al. (2017), which has 50 categories, almost unchanged.

Two linguists labeled every possessive construction in a 55,000-word corpus of English web reviews. They also set policies for idioms and fixed names. Agreement was checked on a random double-annotated sample.

The main findings:
- 28 of the 50 supersenses are enough to cover nearly all tokens.
- The of-genitive and the s-genitive behave very differently. Some relations occur with only one of the two forms.
- Compared with earlier schemes, the inventory is somewhat finer-grained and keeps the direction of a relation explicit.

The work matters because one cross-linguistic label set now covers both prepositions and possessives. The data is released in STREUSLE v4.0. It supports research on the genitive alternation and on automatic disambiguation.

## Key points
- The corpus contains 1,613 possessive tokens labeled with 28 attested supersenses. Each token gets a single label. 11 idiomatic pronoun uses received a special `$ label.
- Inter-annotator agreement was measured on 100 sentences containing 109 s-genitive tokens. Raw agreement was 72% and Cohen's κ was 0.66.
- Labels group into three branches, with clear contrasts between the two forms:

  | Branch | Share of of-tokens | Share of s-genitive tokens |
  |---|---|---|
  | CONFIGURATION (static relations) | 83.3% | 70.3% |
  | PARTICIPANT roles | 13.9% | 29.2% |
  | CIRCUMSTANCE | 2.8% | 0.5% |

- Some labels appear with only one form:
  - The corpus has no clear of-POSSESSOR; ownership is expressed with 's or pronouns.
  - QUANTITY, SPECIES, STUFF, TOPIC, IDENTITY and CHARACTERISTIC occur only with of.
  - BENEFICIARY, ORGROLE and RECIPIENT occur only with the genitive case.
- The scheme has 29 labels including the idiom category. Tratz & Hovy have 18 labels and Badulescu & Moldovan have 22. The supersenses split pairs by direction, e.g. POSSESSOR vs POSSESSION and GESTALT vs CHARACTERISTIC. The data ships in STREUSLE v4.0.

## Interesting ideas
- One relation inventory serves prepositions, the 's clitic and possessive pronouns alike, so different surface forms of the same relation receive the same meaning label instead of separate tag sets.
- The labels state which side holds the relation: owner vs owned, property-holder vs property. This direction is what downstream inference needs to decide who has what.
- Fixed names and possessed idioms are kept out of compositional labeling. Examples are "Ben's Chili Bowl" and "try one's best", where the pronoun must agree with the subject. They are marked as idiom or noncompositional rather than forced into a relation.
- The two forms have strongly skewed relation distributions: ownership and social ties favor 's, while quantity and material favor of. These skews work as cheap, explainable priors for disambiguation.
- Agreement was measured on a random sample annotated independently after a calibration discussion. The second annotator skipped tokens they remembered from that discussion, so the agreement figure would not be inflated.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (frames): Map `nmod:poss`, possessive pronouns and of-`nmod` edges onto the same role vocabulary already used for prepositional frames, so "the car's owner" and "the owner of the car" yield identical frames.
- **I2** (world): When asserting holdings or attributes from possessives, store the direction explicitly (POSSESSOR→thing vs thing→POSSESSION) so "her dog" and "the owner of a new car" create correctly oriented ownership facts.
- **I3** (world): Detect possessed-idiom patterns before entity building so "I tried my best" does not create a spurious possession of a "best" object.
- **I4** (frames): Use the form (of vs 's/PRP$) as a feature or prior when choosing a role for a possessive, e.g. down-weight POSSESSOR for of-phrases and QUANTITY for 's.
- **I5** (learn): When scoring LLM-teacher or witness-parser agreement, exclude examples used in prompt design or rule tuning so agreement estimates stay honest.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Austin Blodgett and Nathan Schneider. 2018. Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{blodgett2018semantic,
  title = {{Semantic Supersenses for English Possessives}},
  author = {Austin Blodgett and Nathan Schneider},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.63317/2drsyqxd93ry},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2drsyqxd93ry}
}
```

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## References

21 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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11. Schneider, Nathan, Hwang, Jena D., Bhatia, Archna, Han, Na-Rae, Srikumar, Vivek, O’Gorman, Tim, and Abend, Omri (2017). [Adposition Supersenses v2](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schneider-2017-adposition-case-supersenses-v2-6/). arXiv preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02134v1 . [↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02134)
12. Schneider, Nathan, Hwang, Jena D., Bhatia, Archna, Han, Na-Rae, Srikumar, Vivek, O’Gorman, Tim, Moeller, Sarah R., Abend, Omri, Blodgett, Austin, and Prange, Jakob (2018). [Adposition and Case Supersenses v2: Guidelines for English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schneider-2017-adposition-case-supersenses-v2-6/). arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02134 . [↗](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02134)
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*Updated 24 October 2026*