:poss in consensus about amr-guidelines

[uhermjakob]

:poss is indeed a little tricky at times. Let me share a little of the original motivation.

As the AMR help page at http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/amr/lib/popup/poss.html describes it, the role :poss ("possessed by") is a very general form of possession. Often used with possessive pronouns, as well as of and 's .

We sometimes use :poss for pertainymns as well, when they are equivalent to semantically equivalent expressions using possessives/'s/of, e.g.

• naval officials = officials of the navy = the navy's officials
• Russian president = president of Russia

I agree that consistency remains a bit of a challenge. For expressions of the type "at the end of the year," different annotators have been using different annotations:

• end-01
• :part-of
• :poss

Our consensus was to use :part/:part-of only for physical parts of a physical objects. See http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/amr/lib/popup/poss.html
I would also hesitate to use end-01, as I don't really see a primary ending event here, and this solution wouldn't work too well with similar expressions such as "middle of the year".

[nschneid]

I understand that :poss originally had a very broad scope, but since then we have created roles for expressing more semantic entity-entity relations, such as :part-of, :consist-of, and :employed-by. My suggestions above assume that :poss is most appropriate for semantic possession/ownership, and is no longer appropriate for most other uses of the 's-genitive, of-genitive, or (for that matter) noun-noun compound constructions.

naval officials = officials of the navy = the navy's officials

True, but isn't this also paraphrasable as navy officials (which would suggest :mod, if not :employed-by)?

Russian president = president of Russia

I realize that the "official role in an institution" relation is not well captured by any of the more semanticky options at our disposal, which is why we fall back to :poss. Ideally we would have a frame for president. But I wasn't proposing to change these.

Our consensus was to use :part/:part-of only for physical parts of a physical objects.

The guidelines have unit of the company with :part. I don't see a need to limit it to physical parts, though we would need a variety of examples to ensure consistency.

For expressions of the type "at the end of the year," different annotators have been using different annotations

Another possibility would be end :subevent-of year, which suggests a temporal subdivision rather than a physical one.

[nschneid]

I should add that the original post lists all the instances of :poss I could find in the consensus that I thought had a better alternative. So changing them should not require extensive digging for similar cases.

[uhermjakob]

OK, I can see that in a few cases, :poss seems a bit weird. I'm personally fine with :mod for academic/fiscal year and possibly with :part-of for area of the factory.
For expressions such as mid-1950s, would middle be a :subevent-of the decade?

[mgeorgescu]

The suggestions for change given for the examples found in the consensus seem reasonable.

[uhermjakob]

OK. Consensus to change the :poss under academic year and fiscal year to :mod. Updated.

[nschneid]

Closing this in favor of #110.