Decomposing Generalization
Models of Generic, Habitual, and Episodic Statements

Venkata Govindarajan
University of Rochester

Benjamin Van Durme
Johns Hopkins University

Aaron Steven White
University of Rochester

Abstract

We present a novel semantic framework for
modeling linguistic expressions of generalization—
generic, habitual, and episodic statements—as
combinations of simple, real-valued referen-
tial properties of predicates and their argu-
ments. We use this framework to construct a
dataset covering the entirety of the Universal
Dependencies English Web Treebank. We use
this dataset to probe the efficacy of type-level
and token-level information—including hand-
engineered features and static (GloVe) and
contextual (ELMo) word embeddings—for
predicting expressions of generalization.

1 Introduction

Natural language allows us to convey not only
information about particular individuals and events,
as in Example (1), but also generalizations about
those individuals and events, as in (2).

(1) a. Mary ate oatmeal for breakfast today.

b. The students completed their assignments.

(2) a. Mary eats oatmeal for breakfast.

b. The students always complete their assign-
ments on time.

This capacity for expressing generalization is
extremely flexible—allowing for generalizations
about the kinds of events that particular individuals
are habitually involved in, as in (2), as well as
characterizations about kinds of things, as in (3).

(3) a. Bishops move diagonally.

b. Soap is used to remove dirt.

Such distinctions between episodic statements (1),
on the one hand, and habitual (2) and generic
(or characterizing) statements (3), on the other,

have a long history in both the linguistics and
artificial intelligence literatures (see Carlson,
2011; Maienborn et al., 2011; Leslie and Lerner,
2016). Nevertheless, few modern semantic parsers
make a systematic distinction (cf. Abzianidze and
Bos, 2017).

This is problematic, because the ability to
accurately capture different modes of generaliza-
tion is likely key to building systems with robust
common sense reasoning (Zhang et al., 2017a;
Bauer et al., 2018): Such systems need some
source for general knowledge about the world
(McCarthy, 1960, 1980, 1986; Minsky, 1974;
Schank and Abelson, 1975; Hobbs et al., 1987;
Reiter, 1987) and natural language text seems like
a prime candidate. It is also surprising, because
there is no dearth of data relevant to linguistic
expressions of generalization (Doddington et al.,
2004; Cybulska and Vossen, 2014b; Friedrich
et al., 2015).

One obstacle to further progress on general-
ization is that current frameworks tend to take
standard descriptive categories as sharp classes—
for example, EPISODIC, GENERIC, HABITUAL for state-
ments and KIND, INDIVIDUAL for noun phrases.
This may seem reasonable for sentences like
(1a), where Mary clearly refers to a particular
individual, or (3a), where Bishops clearly refers
to a kind; but natural text is less forgiving
(Grimm, 2014, 2016, 2018). Consider the under-
lined arguments in (4): Do they refer to kinds
or individuals?

(4) a. I will manage client expectations.

b. The atmosphere may not be for everyone.

c. Thanks again for great customer service!

To remedy this, we propose a novel frame-
work for capturing linguistic expressions of
generalization. Taking inspiration from decompo-
sitional semantics (Reisinger et al., 2015; White
et al., 2016), we suggest that linguistic expressions

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Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, vol. 7, pp. 501–517, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl a 00285
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of generalization should be captured in a contin-
uous multi-label system, rather than a multi-class
system. We do this by decomposing categories
such as EPISODIC, HABITUAL, and GENERIC into simple
referential properties of predicates and their argu-
ments. Using this framework (§3), we develop an
annotation protocol, which we validate (§4) and
compare against previous frameworks (§5). We
then deploy this framework (§6) to construct a
new large-scale dataset of annotations covering
the entire Universal Dependencies (De Marneffe
et al., 2014; Nivre et al., 2015) English Web
Treebank (UD-EWT; Bies et al., 2012; Silveira
et al., 2014)—yielding the Universal Decompo-
sitional Semantics-Genericity (UDS-G) dataset.1

Through exploratory analysis of this dataset,
we demonstrate that this multi-label framework
is well-motivated (§7). We then present models
for predicting expressions of linguistic general-
ization that combine hand-engineered type and
token-level features with static and contextual
learned representations (§8). We find that (i)
referential properties of arguments are easier to
predict than those of predicates; and that (ii)
contextual learned representations contain most
of the relevant information for both arguments
and predicates (§9).

2 Background

Most existing annotation frameworks aim to cap-
ture expressions of linguistic generalization using
multi-class annotation schemes. We argue that
this reliance on multi-class annotation schemes
is problematic on the basis of descriptive and
theoretical work in the linguistics literature.

One of the earliest frameworks explicitly aimed
at capturing expressions of linguistic general-
ization was developed under the ACE-2 program
(Mitchell et al., 2003; Doddington et al., 2004,
and see Reiter and Frank, 2010). This framework
associates entity mentions with discrete labels
for whether they refer to a specific member of
the set in question (SPECIFIC) or any member of
the set in question (GENERIC). The ACE-2005
Multilingual Training Corpus (Walker et al., 2006)
extends these annotation guidelines, providing
two additional classes: (i) negatively quantified
entries (NEG) for referring to empty sets and (ii)

1Data, code, protocol implementation, and task instruc-
tions provided to annotators are available at decomp.io.

underspecified entries (USP), where the referent is
ambiguous between GENERIC and SPECIFIC.

The existence of the USP label already portends
an issue with multi-class annotation schemes,
which have no way of capturing the well-known
phenomena of taxonomic reference (see Carlson
and Pelletier, 1995, and references therein),
abstract/event reference (Grimm, 2014, 2016,
2018), and weak definites (Carlson et al., 2006).
For example, wines in (5) refers to particular
kinds of wine; service in (6) refers to an abstract
entity/event that could be construed as both
particular-referring, in that it is the service at a
specific restaurant, and kind-referring, in that it
encompasses all service events at that restaurant;
and bus in (7) refers to potentially multiple
distinct buses that are grouped into a kind by
the fact that they drive a particular line.

(5) That vintner makes three different wines.

(6) The service at that restaurant is excellent.

(7) That bureaucrat takes the 90 bus to work.

This deficit is remedied to some extent in the
ARRAU (Poesio et al., 2018, and see Mathew,
2009; Louis and Nenkova, 2011) and ECB+
(Cybulska and Vossen, 2014a,b) corpora. The
ARRAU corpus is mainly intended to capture
anaphora resolution, but following the GNOME
guidelines (Poesio, 2004), it also annotates entity
mentions for a GENERIC attribute, sensitive to
whether the mention is in the scope of a relevant
semantic operator (e.g., a conditional or quantifier)
and whether the nominal refers to a type of object
whose genericity is left underspecified, such as a
substance. The ECB+ corpus is an extension of
the EventCorefBank (ECB; Bejan and Harabagiu,
2010; Lee et al., 2012), which annotates Google
News texts for event coreference in accordance
with the TimeML specification (Pustejovsky et al.,
2003), and is an improvement in the sense that, in
addition to entity mentions, event mentions may
be labeled with a GENERIC class.

The ECB+ approach is useful, since episodic,
habitual, and generic statements can straightfor-
wardly be described using combinations of event
and entity mention labels. For example, in ECB+,
episodic statements involve only non-generic
entity and event mentions; habitual statements
involve a generic event mention and at least one

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http://decomp.io


non-generic entity mention; and generic state-
ments involve generic event mentions and at least
one generic entity mention. This demonstrates the
strength of decomposing statements into proper-
ties of the events and entities they describe; but
there remain difficult issues arising from the fact
that the decomposition does not go far enough.
One is that, like ACE-2/2005 and ARRAU, ECB+
does not make it possible to capture taxonomic
and abstract reference or weak definites; another
is that, because ECB+ treats generics as mutu-
ally exclusive from other event classes, it is not
possible to capture that events and states in those
classes can themselves be particular or generic.
This is well known for different classes of events,
such as those determined by a predicate’s lex-
ical aspect (Vendler, 1957); but it is likely also
important for distinguishing more particular stage-
level properties (e.g., availability (8)) from more
generic individual-level properties (e.g., strength
(9)) (Carlson, 1977).

(8) Those firemen are available.

(9) Those firemen are strong.

This situation is improved upon in the Richer
Event Descriptions (RED; O’Gorman et al., 2016)
and Situation Entities (SitEnt; Friedrich and
Palmer, 2014a,b; Friedrich et al., 2015; Friedrich
and Pinkal, 2015b,a; Friedrich et al., 2016) frame-
works, which annotate both NPs and entire clauses
for genericity. In particular, SitEnt, which is
used to annotate MASC (Ide et al., 2010) and
Wikipedia, has the nice property that it rec-
ognizes the existence of abstract entities and
lexical aspectual class of clauses’ main verbs,
along with habituality and genericity. This is use-
ful because, in addition to decomposing state-
ments using the genericity of the main referent and
event, this framework recognizes that lexical as-
pect is an independent phenomenon. In practice,
however, the annotations produced by this frame-
work are mapped into a multi-class scheme contain-
ing only the high-level GENERIC-HABITUAL-EPISODIC
distinction—alongside a conceptually indepen-
dent distinction among illocutionary acts.

A potential argument in favor of mapping into
a multi-class scheme is that, if it is sufficiently
elaborated, the relevant decomposition may be
recoverable. But regardless of such an elaboration,
uncertainty about which class any particular entity
or event falls into cannot be ignored. Some ex-

amples may just not have categorically correct
answers; and even if they do, annotator uncertainty
and bias may obscure them. To account for this,
we develop a novel annotation framework that
both (i) explicitly captures annotator confidence
about the different referential properties discussed
above and (ii) attempts to correct for annotator
bias using standard psycholinguistic methods.

3 Annotation Framework

We divide our framework into two protocols—the
argument and predicate protocols—that probe
properties of individuals and situations (i.e.,
events or states) referred to in a clause. Drawing
inspiration from prior work in decompositional
semantics (White et al., 2016), a crucial aspect of
our framework is that (i) multiple properties can
be simultaneously true for a particular individual
or situation (event or state); and (ii) we explicitly
collect confidence ratings for each property. This
makes our framework highly extensible, because
further properties can be added without breaking
a strict multi-class ontology.

Drawing inspiration from the prior literature
on generalization discussed in §1 and §2, we
focus on properties that lie along three main axes:
whether a predicate or its arguments refer to (i)
instantiated or spatiotemporally delimited (i.e.,
particular) situations or individuals; (ii) classes of
situations (i.e., hypothetical situations) or kinds of
individuals; and/or (iii) intangible (i.e., abstract
concepts or stative situations).

This choice of axes is aimed at allowing
our framework to capture not only the standard
EPISODIC-HABITUAL-GENERIC distinction, but also
phenomena that do not fit neatly into this dis-
tinction, such as taxonomic reference, abstract
reference, and weak definites. The idea here is
similar to prior decompositional semantics work
on semantic protoroles (Reisinger et al., 2015;
White et al., 2016, 2017), which associates
categories like AGENT or PATIENT with sets of
more basic properties, such as volitionality,
causation, change-of-state, and so forth, and is
similarly inspired by classic theoretical work
(Dowty, 1991).

In our framework, prototypical episodics, habit-
uals, and generics correspond to sets of properties
that the referents of a clause’s head predicate and
arguments have—namely, clausal categories are
built up from properties of the predicates that head

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Figure 1: Examples of argument protocol (top) and
predicate protocol (bottom).

them along with those predicates’ arguments. For
instance, prototypical episodic statements, like
those in (1), have arguments that only refer to
particular, non-kind, non-abstract individuals and
a predicate that refers to a particular event or
(possibly) state; prototypical habitual statements,
like those in (2) have arguments that refer to at least
one particular, non-kind, non-abstract individual
and a predicate that refers to a non-particular,
dynamic event; and prototypical generics, like
those in (3), have arguments that only refer to
kinds of individuals and a predicate that refers to
non-particular situations.

It is important to note that these are all proto-
typical properties of episodic, habitual, or generic
statements, in the same way that volitionality is
a prototypical property of agents and change-of-
state is a prototypical property of patients. That is,
our framework explicitly allows for bleed between
categories because it only commits to the referen-
tial properties, not the categories themselves. It is
this ambivalence toward sharp categories that also
allows our framework to capture phenomena that
fall outside the bounds of the standard three-way
distinction. For instance, taxonomic reference, as
in (5), and weak definites, as in (7), prototypically
involve an argument being both particular- and
kind-referring; stage-level properties, as in (8),
prototypically involve particular, non-dynamic
situations, while individual-level properties, as in
(9), prototypically involve non-particular, non-
dynamic situations.

Figure 1 shows examples of the argument pro-
tocol (top) and predicate protocol (bottom), whose
implementation is based on the event factuality
annotation protocol described by White et al.
(2016) and Rudinger et al. (2018). Annotators
are presented with a sentence with one or many
words highlighted, followed by statements pertain-
ing to the highlighted words in the context of
the sentence. They are then asked to fill in the
statement with a binary response saying whether
it does or does not hold and to give their confidence
on a 5-point scale—not at all confident (1), not
very confident (2), somewhat confident (3), very
confident (4), and totally confident (5).

4 Framework Validation

To demonstrate the efficacy of our framework
for use in bulk annotation (reported in §6), we
conduct a validation study on both our predicate
and argument protocols. The aim of these studies
is to establish that annotators display reasonable
agreement when annotating for the properties in
each protocol, relative to their reported confi-
dence. We expect that, the more confident
both annotators are in their annotation, the
more likely it should be that annotators agree on
those annotations.

To ensure that the findings from our validation
studies generalize to the bulk annotation setting,
we simulate the bulk setting as closely as pos-
sible: (i) randomly sampling arguments and pre-
dicates for annotation from the same corpus we
conduct the bulk annotation on UD-EWT; and
(ii) allowing annotators to do as many or as few
annotations as they would like. This design makes
standard measures of interannotator agreement
somewhat difficult to accurately compute, because
different pairs of annotators may annotate only
a small number of overlapping items (arguments/
predicates), so we turn to standard statistical
methods from psycholinguistics to assist in esti-
mation of interannotator agreement.

Predicate and argument extraction We ex-
tracted predicates and their arguments from the
gold UD parses from UD-EWT using PredPatt
(White et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2017b). From the
UD-EWT training set, we then randomly sampled
100 arguments from those headed by a DET, NUM,
NOUN, PROPN, or PRON and 100 predicates from

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those headed by a ADJ, NOUN, NUM, DET, PROPN,
PRON, VERB, or AUX.

Annotators A total of 44 annotators were re-
cruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk to anno-
tate arguments; and 50 annotators were recruited
to annotate predicates. In both cases, arguments
and predicates were presented in batches of 10,
with each predicate and argument annotated by
10 annotators.

Confidence normalization Because different
annotators use the confidence scale in different
ways (e.g., some annotators use all five options
while others only ever respond with totally
confident (5)) we normalize the confidence ratings
for each property using a standard ordinal scale
normalization technique known as ridit scoring
(Agresti, 2003). In ridit scoring, ordinal labels are
mapped to (0, 1) using the empirical cumulative
distribution function of the ratings given by
each annotator. Specifically, for the responses
y(a) given by annotator a, ridity(a)

(
y
(a)
i

)
=

ECDFy(a)
(
y
(a)
i − 1

)
+ 0.5 × ECDFy(a)

(
y
(a)
i

)
.

Ridit scoring has the effect of reweighting the
importance of a scale label based on the frequency
with which it is used. For example, insofar as
an annotator rarely uses extreme values, such
as not at all confident or totally confident, the
annotator is likely signaling very low or very high
confidence, respectively, when they are used; and
insofar as an annotator often uses extreme values,
the annotator is likely not signaling particularly
low or particularly high confidence.

Interannotator Agreement (IAA) Common
IAA statistics, such as Cohen’s or Fleiss’ κ, rely on
the ability to compute both an expected agreement
pe and an observed agreement po, with κ ≡ po−pe1−pe .
Such a computation is relatively straightforward
when a small number of annotators annotate many
items, but when many annotators each annotate
a small number of items pairwise, pe and po can
be difficult to estimate accurately, especially for
annotators that only annotate a few items total.
Further, there is no standard way to incorporate
confidence ratings, like the ones we collect, into
these IAA measures.

To overcome these obstacles, we use a com-
bination of mixed and random effects models
(Gelman and Hill, 2014), which are extremely
common in the analysis of psycholinguistic data

Property β̂0 σ̂ann σ̂item

A
rg

um
en

t Is.Particular 0.49 1.15 1.76
Is.Kind −0.31 1.23 1.34
Is.Abstract −1.29 1.27 1.70

P
re

di
ca

te Is.Particular 0.98 0.91 0.72
Is.Dynamic 0.24 0.82 0.59
Is.Hypothetical −0.78 1.24 0.90

Table 1: Bias (log-odds) for answering true.

(Baayen, 2008), to estimate pe and po for each
property. The basic idea behind using these models
is to allow our estimates of pe and po to be sensi-
tive to the number of items annotators anno-
tated as well as how annotators’ confidence relates
to agreement.

To estimate pe for each property, we fit a
random effects logistic regression to the binary
responses for that property, with random intercepts
for both annotator and item. The fixed intercept
estimate β̂0 for this model is an estimate of the
log-odds that the average annotator would answer
true on that property for the average item; and
the random intercepts give the distribution of
actual annotator (σ̂ann) or item (σ̂item) biases.
Table 1 gives the estimates for each property.
We note a substantial amount of variability in
the bias different annotators have for answering
true on many of these properties. This variability
is evidenced by the fact that σ̂ann and σ̂item are
similar across properties, and it suggests the need
to adjust for annotator biases when analyzing
these data, which we do both here and for our
bulk annotation.

To compute pe from these estimates, we use
a parametric bootstrap. On each replicate, we
sample annotator biases b1, b2 independently
from N(β̂0, σ̂ann), then compute the expected
probability of random agreement in the standard
way: π1π2 + (1 − π1)(1 − π2), where πi =
logit−1(bi). We compute the mean across 9,999
such replicates to obtain pe, shown in Table 2.

To estimate po for each property in a way
that takes annotator confidence into account, we
first compute, for each pair of annotators, each
item they both annotated, and each property they
annotated that item on, whether or not they agree
in their annotation. We then fit separate mixed
effects logistic regressions for each property to
this agreement variable, with a fixed intercept β0
and slope βconf for the product of the annotators’

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Property pe κlow κhigh
A

rg
um

en
t Is.Particular 0.52 0.21 0.77

Is.Kind 0.51 0.12 0.51
Is. Abstract 0.61 0.17 0.80

P
re

di
ca

te Is.Particular 0.58 −0.11 0.54
Is.Dynamic 0.51 −0.02 0.22
Is.Hypothetical 0.54 −0.04 0.60

Table 2: Interannotator agreement scores.

confidence for that item and random intercepts for
both annotator and item.2

We find, for all properties, that there is a reliable
increase (i.e., a positive β̂conf) in agreement as
annotators’ confidence ratings go up (ps < 0.001).
This corroborates our prediction that annotators
should have higher agreement for things they
are confident about. It also suggests the need to
incorporate confidence ratings into the annotations
our models are trained on, which we do in our
normalization of the bulk annotation responses.

From the fixed effects, we can obtain an esti-
mate of the probability of agreement for the
average pair of annotators at each confidence level
between 0 and 1. We compute two versions of κ
based on such estimates: κlow, which corresponds
to 0 confidence for at least one annotator in a pair,
and κhigh, which corresponds to perfect confidence
for both. Table 2 shows these κ estimates.

As implied by reliably positive β̂confs, we see
that κhigh is greater than κlow for all properties.
Further, with the exception of DYNAMIC, κhigh is
generally comparable to the κ estimates reported
in annotations by trained annotators using a
multi-class framework. For instance, compare the
metrics in Table 2 to κann in Table 3 (see §5 for
details), which gives the Fleiss’ κ metric for clause
types in the SitEnt dataset (Friedrich et al., 2016).

5 Comparison to Standard Ontology

To demonstrate that our framework subsumes
standard distinctions (e.g., EPISODIC v. HABITUAL
v. GENERIC) we conduct a study comparing anno-
tations assigned under our multi-label framework
to those assigned under a framework that recog-
nizes such multi-class distinctions. We choose the
the SitEnt framework for this comparison, because

2We use the product of annotator confidences because it
is large when both annotators have high confidence and small
when either annotator has low confidence and always remains
between 0 (lowest confidence) and 1 (highest confidence).

Clause type P R F κmod κann
EVENTIVE 0.68 0.55 0.61 0.49 0.74
STATIVE 0.61 0.59 0.60 0.47 0.67
HABITUAL 0.49 0.52 0.50 0.33 0.43
GENERIC 0.66 0.77 0.71 0.61 0.68

Table 3: Predictability of standard ontology using
our property set in a kernelized support vector
classifier.

it assumes a categorical distinction between
GENERIC, HABITUAL (their GENERALIZING), EPISODIC
(their EVENTIVE), and STATIVE clauses (Friedrich and
Palmer, 2014a,b; Friedrich et al., 2015; Friedrich
and Pinkal, 2015b,a; Friedrich et al., 2016).3

SitEnt is also a useful comparison because it
was constructed by highly trained annotators who
had access to the entire document containing
the clause being annotated, thus allowing us to
assess both how much it matters that we use only
very lightly trained annotators and do not provide
document context.

Predicate and argument extraction For each
of GENERIC, HABITUAL, STATIVE, and EVENTIVE, we
randomly sample 100 clauses from SitEnt such
that (i) that clause’s gold annotation has that
category; and (ii) all SitEnt annotators agreed on
that annotation. We annotate the mainRefer-
ent of these clauses (as defined by SitEnt) in
our argument protocol and the mainVerb in our
predicate protocol, providing annotators only the
sentence containing the clause.

Annotators 42 annotators were recruited from
Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate arguments,
and 45 annotators were recruited to annotate
predicates—both in batches of 10, with each
predicate and argument annotated by 5 annotators.

Annotation normalization As noted in §4,
different annotators use the confidence scale dif-
ferently and have different biases for responding
true or false on different properties (see Table 1).
To adjust for these biases, we construct a nor-
malized score for each predicate and argument
using mixed effects logistic regressions. These
mixed effects models all had (i) a hinge loss
with margin set to the normalized confidence
rating; (ii) fixed effects for property (PARTICULAR,

3SitEnt additionally assumes three other classes, con-
trasting with the four above: IMPERATIVE, QUESTION, and REPORT.
We ignore clauses labeled with these categories.

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KIND, and ABSTRACT for arguments; PARTICULAR,
HYPOTHETICAL, and DYNAMIC for predicates) token,
and their interaction; and (iii) by-annotator ran-
dom intercepts and random slopes for property
with diagonal covariance matrices. The rationale
behind (i) is that true should be associated with
positive values; false should be associated with
negative values; and the confidence rating should
control how far from zero the normalized rating
is, adjusting for the biases of annotators that
responded to a particular item. The resulting re-
sponse scale is analogous to current approaches
to event factuality annotation (Lee et al., 2015;
Stanovsky et al., 2017; Rudinger et al., 2018).

We obtain a normalized score from these
models by setting the Best Linear Unbiased Pre-
dictors for the by-annotator random effects to zero
and using the Best Linear Unbiased Estimators
for the fixed effects to obtain a real-valued label
for each token on each property. This procedure
amounts to estimating a label for each property
and each token based on the ‘‘average annotator.’’

Quantitative comparison To compare our anno-
tations to the gold situation entity types from
SitEnt, we train a support vector classifier with
a radial basis function kernel to predict the
situation entity type of each clause on the basis
of the normalized argument property annotations
for that clause’s mainReferent and the nor-
malized predicate property annotations for that
clause’s mainVerb. The hyperparameters for
this support vector classifier were selected using
exhaustive grid search over the regularization
parameter λ ∈ {1, 10, 100, 1000} and bandwidth
σ ∈

{
10−2, 10−3, 10−4, 10−5

}
in a 5-fold cross-

validation (CV). This 5-fold CV was nested within
a 10-fold CV, from which we calculate metrics.

Table 3 reports the precision, recall, and F-score
computed using the held-out set in each fold of
the 10-fold CV. For purposes of comparison, it
also gives the Fleiss’ κ reported by Friedrich et al.
(2016) for each property (κann) as well as Cohen’s
κ between our model predictions on the held-out
folds and the gold SitEnt annotations (κmod). One
way to think about κmod is that it tells us what
agreement we would expect if we used our model
as an annotator instead of highly trained humans.

We see that our model’s agreement (κmod) tracks
interannotator agreement (κann) surprisingly well.
Indeed, in some cases, such as for GENERIC, our
model’s agreement is within a few points of

Figure 2: Mean property value for each clause type.

interannotator agreement. This pattern is sur-
prising, because our model is based on annota-
tions by very lightly trained annotators who have
access to very limited context compared with the
annotators of SitEnt, who receive the entire doc-
ument in which a clause is found. Indeed, our
model has access to even less context than it could
otherwise have on the basis of our framework,
since we only annotate one of the potentially
many arguments occurring in a clause; thus, the
metrics in Table 3 are likely somewhat conser-
vative. This pattern may further suggest that,
although having extra context for annotating com-
plex semantic phenomena is always preferable, we
still capture useful information by annotating only
isolated sentences.

Qualitative comparison Figure 2 shows the
mean normalized value for each property in our
framework broken out by clause type. As ex-
pected, we see that episodics tend to have
particular-referring arguments and predicates,
whereas generics tend to have kind-referring
arguments and non-particular predicates. Also as
expected, episodics and habituals tend to refer
to situations that are more dynamic than statives
and generics. But although it makes sense that
generics would be, on average, near zero for
dynamicity—since generics can be about both
dynamic and non-dynamic situations—it is less
clear why statives are not more negative. This
pattern may arise in some way from the fact that

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there is relatively lower agreement on dynamicity,
as noted in §4.

6 Bulk Annotation

We use our annotation framework to collect anno-
tations of predicates and arguments on UD-EWT
using the PredPatt system—thus yielding the Uni-
versal Decompositional Semantics–Genericity
(UDS-G) dataset. Using UD-EWT in conjunction
with PredPatt has two main advantages over other
similar corpora: (i) UD-EWT contains text from
multiple genres—not just newswire—with gold
standard Universal Dependency parses; and (ii)
there are now a wide variety of other semantic
annotations on top of UD-EWT that use the
PredPatt standard (White et al., 2016; Rudinger
et al., 2018; Vashishtha et al., 2019).

Predicate and argument extraction PredPatt
identifies 34,025 predicates and 56,246 arguments
of those predicates from 16,622 sentences. Based
on analysis of the data from our validation study
(§4) and other pilot experiments (not reported
here), we developed a set of heuristics for filtering
certain tokens that PredPatt identifies as predicates
and arguments, either because we found that there
was little variability in the label assigned to
particular subsets of tokens—for example, pro-
nominal arguments (such as I, we, he, she, etc.) are
almost always labeled particular, non-kind, and
non-abstract (with the exception of you and they,
which can be kind-referring)—or because it
is not generally possible to answer questions
about those tokens (e.g., adverbial predicates are
excluded). Based on these filtering heuristics, we
retain 37,146 arguments and 33,114 predicates
for annotation. Table 4 compares these numbers
against the resources described in §2.

Annotators We recruited 482 annotators from
Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate arguments,
and 438 annotators were recruited to annotate
predicates. Arguments and predicates in the UD-
EWT validation and test sets were annotated
by three annotators each; and those in the UD-
EWT train set were annotated by one each. All
annotations were performed in batches of 10.

Annotation normalization We use the anno-
tation normalization procedure described in §5, fit
separately to our train and development splits, on
the one hand, and our test split, on the other.

Corpus Level Scheme Size
ACE-2

NP multi-class 40,106
ACE-2005

ECB+
Arg. multi-class 12,540
Pred. multi-class 14,884

CFD NP multi-class 3,422
Matthew et al clause multi-class 1,052
ARRAU NP multi-class 91,933

SitEnt
Topic multi-class

40,940
Clause multi-class

RED
Arg. multi-class 10,319
Pred. multi-class 8,731

UDS-G
Arg. multi-label 37,146
Pred. multi-label 33,114

Table 4: Survey of genericity annotated corpora
for English, including our new corpus (in bold).

7 Exploratory Analysis

Before presenting models for predicting our prop-
erties, we conduct an exploratory analysis to dem-
onstrate that the properties of the dataset relate
to other token- and type-level semantic properties
in intuitive ways. Figure 3 plots the normalized
ratings for the argument (left) and predicate (right)
protocols. Each point corresponds to a token and
the density plots visualize the number of points in
a region.

Arguments We see that arguments have a slight
tendency (Pearson correlation ρ=−0.33) to refer
to either a kind or a particular—for example, place
in (10) falls in the lower right quadrant (particular-
referring) and transportation in (11) falls in
the upper left quadrant (kind-referring)—though
there are a not insignificant number of arguments
that refer to something that is both—for example,
registration in (12) falls in the upper right
quadrant.

(10) I think this place is probably really great
especially judging by the reviews on here.

(11) What made it perfect was that they offered
transportation so that[...]

(12) Some places do the registration right at the
hospital[...]

We also see that there is a slight tendency for
arguments that are neither particular-referring
(ρ = −0.28) nor kind-referring (ρ = −0.11) to
be abstract-referring—for example, power in (13)

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Figure 3: Distribution of normalized annotations in argument (left) and predicate (right) protocols.

falls in the lower left quadrant (only abstract-
referring)—but that there are some arguments that
refer to abstract particulars and some that refer to
abstract kinds—for example, both reputation (14)
and argument (15) are abstract, but reputation
falls in the lower right quadrant, while argument
falls in the upper left.

(13) Power be where power lies.

(14) Meanwhile, his reputation seems to be
improving, although Bangs noted a ‘‘pretty
interesting social dynamic.’’

(15) The Pew researchers tried to transcend the
economic argument.

Predicates We see that there is effectively no
tendency (ρ = 0.00) for predicates that refer to
particular situations to refer to dynamic events—
for example, faxed in (16) falls in the upper
right quadrant (particular- and dynamic-referring),
while available in (17) falls in the lower right
quadrant (particular- and non-dynamic-referring).

(16) I have faxed to you the form of Bond[...]

(17) is gare montparnasse storage still available?

But we do see that there is a slight tendency
(ρ = −0.25) for predicates that are hypothetical-
referring not to be particular-referring—for ex-
ample, knows in (18a) and do in (18b) are
hypotheticals in the lower left.

(18) a. Who knows what the future might hold,
and it might be expensive?

b. I have tryed to give him water but he wont
take it...what should i do?

8 Models

We consider two forms of predicate and argument
representations to predict the three attributes in our
framework: hand-engineered features and learned
features. For both, we contrast both type-level
information and token-level information.

Hand-engineered features We consider five
sets of type-level hand-engineered features.

1. Concreteness Concreteness ratings for root
argument lemmas in the argument protocol
from the concreteness database (Brysbaert
et al., 2014) and the mean, maximum, and
minimum concreteness rating of a predicate’s
arguments in the predicate protocol.

2. Eventivity Eventivity and stativity ratings for
the root predicate lemma in the predicate
protocol and the predicate head of the root
argument in the argument protocol from the
LCS database (Dorr, 2001).

3. VerbNet Verb classes from VerbNet (Schuler,
2005) for root predicate lemmas.

4. FrameNet Frames evoked by root predicate
lemmas in the predicate protocol and for both

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the root argument lemma and its predicate
head in the argument protocol from FrameNet
(Baker et al., 1998).

5. WordNet The union of WordNet (Fellbaum,
1998) supersenses (Ciaramita and Johnson,
2003) for all WordNet senses the root
argument or predicate lemmas can have.

And we consider two sets of token-level hand-
engineered features.

1. Syntactic features POS tags, UD morpho-
logical features, and governing dependencies
were extracted using PredPatt for the predi-
cate/argument root and all of its dependents.

2. Lexical features Function words (determin-
ers, modals, auxiliaries) in the dependents of
the arguments and predicates.

Learned features For our type-level learned
features, we use the 42B uncased GloVe embed-
dings for the root of the annotated predicate or
argument (Pennington et al., 2014). For our token-
level learned features, we use 1,024-dimensional
ELMo embeddings (Peters et al., 2018). To obtain
the latter, the UD-EWT sentences are passed as
input to the ELMo three-layered biLM, and we
extract the output of all three hidden layers for the
root of the annotated predicates and arguments,
giving us 3,072-dimensional vectors for each.

Labeling models For each protocol, we predict
the three normalized properties corresponding to
the annotated token(s) using different subsets of
the above features. The feature representation is
used as the input to a multilayer perceptron with
ReLU nonlinearity and L1 loss. The number of
hidden layers and their sizes are hyperparameters
that we tune on the development set.

Implementation For all experiments, we use
stochastic gradient descent to train the multilayer
perceptron parameters with the Adam optimizer
(Kingma and Ba, 2015), using the default learning
rate in pytorch (10−3). We performed ablation
experiments on the four major classes of features
discussed above.

Hyperparameters For each of the ablation ex-
periments, we ran a hyperparameter grid search
over hidden layer sizes (one or two hidden layers
with sizes h1, h2 ∈ {512, 256, 128, 64, 32}; h2
at most half of h1), L2 regularization penalty l ∈

{
0, 10−5, 10−4, 10−3

}
, and the dropout probability

d ∈ {0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5}.

Development For all models, we train for at
most 20 epochs with early stopping. At the end
of each epoch, the L1 loss is calculated on the
development set, and if it is higher than the pre-
vious epoch, we stop training, saving the param-
eter values from the previous epoch.

Evaluation Consonant with work in event fac-
tuality prediction, we report Pearson correlation
(ρ) and proportion of mean absolute error (MAE)
explained by the model, which we refer to as R1
on analogy with the variance explained R2 = ρ2.

R1 = 1 −
MAEpmodel

MAEpbaseline

where MAEpbaseline is always guessing the median
for property p. We calculate R1 across properties
(wR1) by taking the mean R1 weighted by the
MAE for each property.

These metrics together are useful, because ρ
tells us how similar the predictions are to the
true values, ignoring scale, and R1 tells us how
close the predictions are to the true values, after
accounting for variability in the data. We focus
mainly on differences in relative performance
among our models, but for comparison, state-
of-the-art event factuality prediction systems
obtain ρ ≈ 0.77 and R1 ≈ 0.57 for predicting
event factuality on the predicates we annotate
(Rudinger et al., 2018).

9 Results

Table 5 contains the results on the test set for
both the argument (top) and predicate (bottom)
protocols. We see that (i) our models are generally
better able to predict referential properties of
arguments than those of predicates; (ii) for both
predicates and arguments, contextual learned repre-
sentations contain most of the relevant information
for both arguments and predicates, though the
addition of hand-engineered features can give
a slight performance boost, particularly for the
predicate properties; and (iii) the proportion of
absolute error explained is significantly lower than
what we might expect from the variance explained
implied by the correlations. We discuss (i) and (ii)
here, deferring discussion of (iii) to §10.

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Feature sets Is.Particular Is.Kind Is.Abstract All
Type Token GloVe ELMO ρ R1 ρ R1 ρ R1 wR1

A
R

G
U

M
E

N
T

+ − − − 42.4 7.4 30.2 4.9 51.4 11.7 8.1
− + − − 50.6 13.0 41.5 8.8 33.8 4.8 8.7
− − + − 44.5 8.3 33.4 4.6 45.2 7.7 6.9
− − − + 57.5 17.0 48.1 13.3 55.7 14.9 15.1
+ + − − 55.3 14.1 46.2 11.6 52.6 13.0 12.9
− + − + 58.6 15.6 48.6 13.7 56.8 14.2 14.5
+ + − + 58.3 16.3 47.8 13.2 56.3 15.2 14.9
+ + + + 58.1 17.0 48.9 13.2 56.1 15.1 15.1

Is.Particular Is.Hypothetical Is.Dynamic

P
R

E
D

IC
A

T
E

+ − − − 14.0 0.8 13.4 0.0 32.5 5.6 2.0
− + − − 22.3 2.8 37.7 7.3 31.7 5.1 5.1
− − + − 20.6 2.2 23.4 2.4 29.7 4.6 3.0
− − − + 26.2 3.6 43.1 10.0 37.0 6.8 6.8
− − + + 26.8 4.0 42.8 8.9 37.3 7.3 6.7
+ + − − 24.0 3.3 37.9 7.6 37.1 7.6 6.1
− + − + 27.4 4.1 43.3 10.1 38.6 7.8 7.4
+ − − + 27.1 4.0 43.0 10.1 37.5 7.6 7.2
+ + + + 26.8 4.1 43.5 10.3 37.1 7.2 7.2

Table 5: Correlation (ρ) and MAE explained (R1) on test split for argument (top) and predicate
(bottom) protocols. Bolded numbers give the best result in the column; the models highlighted in
blue are the ones analyzed in §10.

Argument properties While type-level hand-
engineered and learned features perform relatively
poorly for properties such as IS.PARTICULAR and
IS.KIND for arguments, they are able to predict
IS.ABSTRACT relatively well compared to the models
with all features. The converse of this also
holds: Token-level hand-engineered features are
better able to predict IS.PARTICULAR and IS.KIND,
but perform relatively poorly on their own for
IS.ABSTRACT.

This seems likely to be a product of abstract
reference being fairly strongly associated with
particular lexical items, while most arguments can
refer to particulars and kinds (and which they
refer to is context-dependent). And in light of
the relatively good performance of contextual
learned features alone, it suggests that these
contextual learned features—in contrast to the
hand-engineered token-level features—are able to
use this information coming from the lexical item.

Interestingly, however, the models with both
contextual learned features (ELMo) and hand-
engineered token-level features perform slightly
better than those without the hand-engineered
features across the board, suggesting that there is
some (small) amount of contextual information

relevant to generalization that the contextual
learned features are missing. This performance
boost may be diminished by improved contextual
encoders, such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019).

Predicate properties We see a pattern similar
to the one observed for the argument properties
mirrored in the predicate properties: Whereas
type-level hand-engineered and learned features
perform relatively poorly for properties such as
IS.PARTICULAR and IS.HYPOTHETICAL, they are able
to predict IS.DYNAMIC relatively well compared
with the models with all features. The converse
of this also holds: Token-level hand-engineered
features are better able to predict IS.PARTICULAR
and IS.HYPOTHETICAL, but perform relatively poorly
on their own for IS.DYNAMIC.

One caveat here is that, unlike for IS.ABSTRACT,
type-level learned features (GloVe) alone perform
quite poorly for IS.DYNAMIC, and the difference
between the models with only type-level hand-
engineered features and the ones with only
token-level hand-engineered features is less stark
for IS.DYNAMIC than for IS.ABSTRACT. This may
suggest that, though IS.DYNAMIC is relatively con-
strained by the lexical item, it may be more
contextually determined than IS.ABSTRACT. Another

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Figure 4: True (normalized) property values for argument (top) and predicate (bottom) protocols in the development
set plotted against values predicted by models highlighted in blue in Table 5.

major difference between the argument prop-
erties and the predicate properties is that
IS.PARTICULAR is much more difficult to predict than
IS.HYPOTHETICAL. This contrasts with IS.PARTICULAR
for arguments, which is easier to predict than
IS.KIND.

10 Analysis

Figure 4 plots the true (normalized) property val-
ues for the argument (top) and predicate (bottom)
protocols from the development set against the
values predicted by the models highlighted in blue
in Table 5. Points are colored by the part-of-speech
of the argument or predicate root.

We see two overarching patterns. First, our
models are generally reluctant to predict values
outside the [−1, 1] range, despite the fact that
there are not an insignificant number of true values
outside this range. This behavior likely contributes
to the difference we saw between the ρ and R1
metrics, wherein R1 was generally worse than
we would expect from ρ. This pattern is starkest
for IS.PARTICULAR in the predicate protocol, where
predictions are nearly all constrained to [0, 1].

Second, the model appears to be heavily reliant
on part-of-speech information—or some semantic
information related to part-of-speech—for making
predictions. This behavior can be seen in the
fact that, though common noun-rooted arguments
get relatively variable predictions, pronoun- and
proper noun-rooted arguments are almost always
predicted to be particular, non-kind, non-abstract;
and though verb-rooted predicates also get rela-
tively variable predictions, common noun-, adjective-,
and proper noun-rooted predicates are almost
always predicted to be non-dynamic.

Argument protocol Proper nouns tend to refer
to particular, non-kind, non-abstract entities, but
they can be kind-referring, which our models miss:
iPhone in (20) and Marines in (19) were predicted
to have low kind score and high particular
score, while annotators label these arguments as
non-particular and kind-referring.

(19) The US Marines took most of Fallujah
Wednesday, but still face[...]

(20) I’m writing an essay...and I need to know if
the iPhone was the first Smart Phone.

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This similarly holds for pronouns. As men-
tioned in §6, we filtered out several pronominal
arguments, but certain pronouns—like you, they,
yourself, themselves—were not filtered because
they can have both particular- and kind-referring
uses. Our models fail to capture instances where
pronouns are labeled kind-referring (e.g., you in
(21) and (22)) consistently predicting low IS.KIND
scores, likely because they are rare in our data.

(21) I like Hayes Street Grill....another plus, it’s
right by Civic Center, so you can take a
romantic walk around the Opera House, City
Hall, Symphony Auditorium[...]

(22) What would happen if you flew the flag of
South Vietnam in Modern day Vietnam?

This behavior is not seen with common nouns:
The model correctly predicts common nouns in
certain contexts as non-particular, non-abstract,
and kind-referring (e.g., food in (23) and men in
(24)).

(23) Kitchen puts out good food[...]

(24) just saying most men suck!

Predicate protocol As in the argument protocol,
general trends associated with part-of-speech are
exaggerated by the model. We noted in §7 that
annotators tend to annotate hypothetical predicates
as non-particular and vice-versa (ρ= −0.25), but
the model’s predictions are anti-correlated to a
much greater extent (ρ = −0.79). For example,
annotators are more willing to say a predicate can
refer to particular, hypothetical situations (25) or
a non-particular, non-hypothetical situation (26).

(25) Read the entire article[...]

(26) it s illegal to sell stolen property, even if you
don’t know its stolen.

The model also had a bias towards partic-
ular predicates referring to dynamic predicates
(ρ = 0.34)—a correlation not present among
annotators. For instance, is closed in (27) was
annotated as particular but non-dynamic but
predicted by the model to be particular and dy-
namic; and helped in (28) was annotated as non-
particular and dynamic, but the model predicted
particular and dynamic.

(27) library is closed.

(28) I have a new born daughter and she helped
me with a lot.

11 Conclusion

We have proposed a novel semantic framework for
modeling linguistic expressions of generalization
as combinations of simple, real-valued referential
properties of predicates and their arguments.
We used this framework to construct a dataset
covering the entirety of the Universal Depen-
dencies English Web Treebank and probed the
ability of both hand-engineered and learned type-
and token-level features to predict the annotations
in this dataset.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank three anonymous re-
viewers and Chris Potts for useful comments
on this paper as well as Scott Grimm and the
FACTS.lab at the University of Rochester for use-
ful comments on the framework and protocol
design. This research was supported by the Univer-
sity of Rochester, JHU HLTCOE, and DARPA
AIDA. The U.S. Government is authorized to re-
produce and distribute reprints for Governmental
purposes. The views and conclusions contained
in this publication are those of the authors and
should not be interpreted as representing official
policies or endorsements of DARPA or the U.S.
Government.

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	Introduction
	Background
	Annotation Framework
	Framework Validation
	Comparison to Standard Ontology
	Bulk Annotation
	Exploratory Analysis
	Models
	Results
	Analysis
	Conclusion