---
title: "Abstraction and Generalisation in Semantic Role — Merlo 2009"
description: "The paper compares two role inventories, PropBank (abstract labels A0 to A5, AA, and adjunct tags) and VerbNet…"
authors: ["Paola Merlo", "Lonneke van der Plas"]
year: 2009
venue: "Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/P09-1033/"
doi: "10.3115/1687878.1687920"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/merlo-2009-abstraction-generalisation-semantic-role-labels/"
---
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# Abstraction and Generalisation in Semantic Role Labels: PropBank, VerbNet or both?

**Authors:** [Paola Merlo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/paola-merlo/), [Lonneke van der Plas](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/lonneke-van-der-plas/) · **Year:** 2009 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th IJCNLP of the AFNLP **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P09-1033](https://aclanthology.org/P09-1033/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**31** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2128724728) OpenAlex · 2026-10-14 · [**14** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/merlo-2009-abstraction-generalisation-semantic-role-labels/cited-by/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P09-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P09-1033/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P09-1033.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1687878.1687920](https://doi.org/10.3115/1687878.1687920)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2128724728)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Paola Merlo](https://openalex.org/A5102715103) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6363-4498) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/143939590) · h 20 · 1372 citations · 114 works
2. [Lonneke van der Plas](https://openalex.org/A5022407073) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2871-2574) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3356545) · h 14 · 866 citations · 67 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper compares two role inventories, PropBank (abstract labels A0 to A5, AA, and adjunct tags) and VerbNet (23 thematic roles, grouped into 7 classes for the comparison). It does not train a parser or a labeller. It uses information-theoretic counts over the SemLink mapping of the Wall Street Journal training and development sections (106,459 role pairs; 68,268 dependencies for the syntax analysis). PropBank labels are easier to learn (entropy 1.37 bits, against 2.06 for the VerbNet groups). VerbNet labels carry more information and depend more on the verb: mutual information with the verb is 1.03 bits for VerbNet and 0.26 bits for PropBank. PropBank role sets correlate more with dependency labels (symmetric uncertainty 0.49, against 0.39). An animacy effect on the subject pronouns is significant for VerbNet only. The authors conclude that both inventories are useful: VerbNet when the verb is known, PropBank when it is not.

## Ideas

- I1. A two-tier role lookup in the frame reader: (verb, sense) gives a verb-specific thematic role; when the verb is not in the lexicon, fall back to a coarse abstract label (A0 or A1 style). Implement the order in `prag/src/roles.rs`, and measure accuracy at each step on school sentences.
- I2. Report the entropy, mutual information and symmetric uncertainty of Mova's own role labels against the verb and against the dependency relation, as a diagnostic table. It shows how much the rules depend on the verb, which the paper argues is the key property.
- I3. Test the animacy effect with a fixed pronoun list (I, you, he, she, it and so on) as a deterministic feature for agent assignment. The paper's test is a count-based ANOVA, which Mova can run with plain counts.
- I4. Use the role-set counts (PropBank: 62 role sets; VerbNet: 116 combinations) as a closed-world check: a proposition whose role set was never seen in the lessons is flagged rather than silently accepted. Measure the flag rate on held-out lessons.

## For Mova

The chapters are [languages/en/13-verbs.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/) and [languages/en/28-voice-and-passive.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/28-voice-and-passive/). The code is `prag/src/roles.rs`, with the verb lexicon in `en/src/dict.rs`. Measure with the school test sentences and the two-fold `cv` split. Run twice and compare the outputs, since the counts must be ordered by BTreeMap.

Topics: [Semantic role labeling](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1687878.1687920](https://doi.org/10.3115/1687878.1687920)

```bibtex
@inproceedings{merlo2009abstraction,
  title = {{Abstraction and Generalisation in Semantic Role Labels: PropBank, VerbNet or both?}},
  author = {Merlo, Paola and Plas, Lonneke van der},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3115/1687878.1687920},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1687878.1687920}
}
```

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## References

21 references, 4 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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