Who does what to whom?

[eseyffarth]

Instead of distracting myself from work by doing a silly NaNoGenMo project, this year I want to aid my work with the silly NaNoGenMo project I'll attempt.

I'm working on verb frames, so I hope to find out who does what to whom... like... in general. Turning my initial findings into a 50,000 word book should be a piece of cake/fun impossible mess.

[eseyffarth]

I've decided to literally ask the question Who does what to whom? with this GenMo.

As dev data, I will use the English portion of the Universal Dependencies treebanks, since having a dependency-parsed corpus is really useful for my approach. When I've refined my code, I'll probably run it on a parse of the British National Corpus.

My first debug output already looks sort of interesting, though the fact that I forgot to insert the verbs into their sentences makes it a bit weird:

AP story : Bush Tuesday individuals replace . Bush Anderson term , replacing . Bush also Kramer term , replacing . incident lost . city , guerrillas bomb station , killing . US helicopter fire , but safe . Fallujah , hundreds out troops arrested . troops crowd , killing . It clear me done . colonization , attacks , derail . death vacuum .

The original first sentence was as follows: From the AP comes this story : I want to turn a sentence like this into a question, like this: From where comes what story?

Particularly interesting to me is the question of what I should leave in from the original text and what I should exchance for a question word, pronoun, or leave out. For instance, the third-to-last sentence in my above example was as follows: It seems clear to me that the manhunt for high Baath officials in the Sunni heartland is being done wrong, or at least in ways that are bad for US standing with local Iraqis. How do I deal with that? "It seems clear to whom?" "What seems clear to me?" I'll let you know when I have an update.