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# Recognizing Expressions of Commonsense Psychology in English Text

**Authors:** Andrew Gordon, Abe Kazemzadeh, Anish Nair and Milena Petrova · **Year:** 2003 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2003) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P03-1027](https://aclanthology.org/P03-1027/) (DOI [10.3115/1075096.1075123](https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075123)) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**25** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2101110304) openalex · 2026-10-19[**3** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/gordon-2003-recognizing-expressions-commonsense-psychology-english/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P03-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P03-1027/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P03-1027.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1075096.1075123](https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075123)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2101110304)

**Authors (4)**

1. [Andrew Gordon](https://openalex.org/A5070125884) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/35168946) · h 23 · 2079 citations · 163 works
2. [Abe Kazemzadeh](https://openalex.org/A5019787390) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1851-294X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1764265) · h 19 · 6404 citations · 56 works
3. Anish Nair [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2055262673)
4. Milena Petrova [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2269563630)

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

## What it is about

The authors hand-write local grammars, compiled into finite-state transducers with the Intex tool, that recognise expressions of commonsense psychology (beliefs, memory, explanation, similarity) in English. Four conceptual areas were completed. A survey of 99 volunteers supplied 297 positive and 297 negative sentences per area; six raters then filtered sentences that did not follow the instructions (inter-rater kappa 0.56 to 0.81). On the filtered data the grammars reach 95.15% precision and 81.51% recall overall. They beat unigram and bigram SVMs on accuracy in three of four areas, and an SVM that also gets the grammar's concept hits as features beats both. Applied to the U.S. State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2003, the grammars find 4,290 references to adversarial and competitive goals, peaking in years of war.

## Ideas

- I1. Psychological verb grammar in UD terms: rules over lemma and dependency (believe, remember, explain with ccomp, xcomp and nsubj) instead of surface strings, in `prag/src/frames.rs`. Each hit becomes a frame with a reason, which can feed `world/src/events.rs`.
- I2. Report precision and recall before and after filtering the test sentences, as the paper does, and fix the filter rules before measuring, so that the filter does not favour the system.
- I3. Use the grammar hits as extra features in a perceptron that decides speech-act or hedge labels in `prag`. The paper shows that such features help a classifier; measure on cross-validation, not on the held-out set.
- I4. Corpus rate: hits per 100 words over a dated open corpus, to show when a category rises, as in the paper's Figure 1.

## For Mova

Chapters: [23. Complementation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/23-complementation/) (believe that, remember to), [19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) and [30. Pragmatics and discourse: overview](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/30-pragmatics-overview/). Code: `prag/src/frames.rs`, `prag/src/roles.rs`, `world/src/events.rs`. Measure: precision and recall on the school sentences before and after filtering, run twice.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1075096.1075123](https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075123)

```
@inproceedings{gordon2003recognizing,
  title = {{Recognizing Expressions of Commonsense Psychology in English Text}},
  author = {Gordon, Andrew and Kazemzadeh, Abe and Nair, Anish and Petrova, Milena},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2003},
  doi = {10.3115/1075096.1075123},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1075096.1075123}
}
```

- [← previous Metre and clitics in Old English and Old Saxon](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/goering-2025-metre-clitics-old-english-old/)
- [next → Construction of an English Dependency Corpus incorporating Compound Function Words](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/gram-2016-kato-construction-english-dependency-corpus-incorporating/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

12 references, 1 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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