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# English Resource Semantics

**Authors:** [Dan Flickinger](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/dan-flickinger/), [Emily M. Bender](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/emily-m-bender/), Woodley Packard · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts **Link:** [aclanthology.org/N16-4001](https://aclanthology.org/N16-4001/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**4** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2471243283) openalex · 2026-10-19[**4** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2016-flickinger-english-resource-semantics/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/N16-4/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/N16-4001/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N16-4001.pdf)
- [DOI 10.18653/v1/n16-4001](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n16-4001)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2471243283)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Dan Flickinger](https://openalex.org/A5089106912) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7959-999X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3209288) · h 32 · 5154 citations · 155 works
2. [Emily M. Bender](https://openalex.org/A5023750515) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5384-6227) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2471699) · h 31 · 12777 citations · 255 works
3. [Woodley Packard](https://openalex.org/A5077155090) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1836878) · h 6 · 121 citations · 13 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

This is a tutorial abstract for the English Resource Grammar (ERG), a broad-coverage HPSG grammar of English, and for its semantic output, English Resource Semantics (ERS), in Minimal Recursion Semantics. ERS carries semantic roles, the scope of quantifiers and negation, and representations of time, dates, conditionals and comparatives. Gold ERS comes from the Redwoods treebank and from DeepBank over the Wall Street Journal. The abstract lists uses of ERS in negation scope detection, textual entailment and robot commands. It contains no new measurements; it is a pointer to a precise grammar as a semantic reference for English.

## Ideas

- I1. prag: score the negation scope that prag assigns to the chapter 27 examples against ERS negation scopes from Redwoods or DeepBank on a sample held out for tests; the data is research-only, so test only, and the measure is scope accuracy per construction.
- I2. world: use ERS predicate-argument pairs as the reference for controlled subjects and relative-clause antecedents, and measure the antecedent accuracy of `world` on a test-only sample of ERS-annotated sentences.

## For Mova

The relevant chapters are 27-negation (the scope test in I1), 25-relative-clauses (the antecedent test in I2) and 23-complementation (controlled subjects). The code is in the `prag` and `world` crates, which read UD trees into frames and events. Measure first: negation scope of `prag` on a small test-only sample, because it is the cheapest check of whether the frames carry the scope information at all.

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

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.18653/v1/n16-4001](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n16-4001)

```
@inproceedings{flickinger2016english,
  title = {{English Resource Semantics}},
  author = {Flickinger, Dan and Bender, Emily M. and Packard, Woodley},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/n16-4001},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/n16-4001}
}
```

- [← previous Verb Phrase Ellipsis Resolution Using Discriminative and Margin-Infused Algorithms](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2016-dean-verb-phrase-ellipsis-resolution-discriminative/)
- [next → An Evaluation of Parser Robustness for Ungrammatical Sentences](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2016-hashemi-evaluation-parser-robustness-ungrammatical-sentences/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

20 references, 2 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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