Use of quantities as generic entity types? about amr-guidelines

[uhermjakob]

Good point. In a sense, there are really two levels of monetary quantities:
(1) a precise monetary-quantity with a specific :quant and a specific :value
Example: $5 (m / monetary-quantity :quant 5 :unit (d / dollar))
(2) A larger semantic class of monetary quantities.
Example: approximately $5, a lot of money, the amount spent on advertising

One solution:
Introduce semantic classes class-monetary-quantity, class-temporal-quantity, ...
and use them as a special NE-type instead of "thing". But in cases such as
(a / approximately :op1 (m / monetary-quantity :quant 5 :unit (d / dollar)))
where both "a" and "m" are of class class-monetary-quantity, we don't make
any changes, relying instead on tools TBD that can automatically determine
such a semantic class.
Conversely, we might use monetary-quantity and specific-monetary-quantity,
but I'm hesitant to make a change that would require massive changes to our AMR Bank.

[nschneid]

@ULFULF: What's wrong with using monetary-quantity for both precise and imprecise amounts? Would it be sufficient to define your class (1) as monetary-quantities with a :quant and :unit?

[uhermjakob]

@nschneid: Pragmatic reasons. More lenient typing would make it much harder for the AMR Checker to catch errors. It would probably also make it a bit harder to make a clear case how fuzzy quantities (such as "about $5") are built based on precise quantities, top-modified by fuzzy operators such as between and approximately.

[cbonial]

I think that it's easy enough for annotators to recognize the distinction that we could use something like class-monetary quantity as an entity type and also know when to use the actual monetary-quantity. I actually like the "class" terminology and think this reinforces the distinction.

[kevincrawfordknight]

feel free to use:

(m2 / maintain-01
:arg1 (m / monetary-quantity
:arg3-of (s / spend-01 ...)))

instead of:

(m2 / maintain-01
:arg1 (t / thing
:arg3-of (s / spend-01 ...)))

(m2 / maintain-01
:arg1 (s / spend-01 ...))