bcv-commons/argument-roles

Argument roles (v0.1)

Every constituent of every clause of the two bcv-commons clause layouts, with its grammatical relation, the clause's voice, the verb frame's macrorole and a semantic role: actor, undergoer, recipient, addressee, goal, source, location, time, accompaniment, instrument, means, beneficiary, agent and others. These are what a translation into another language needs to choose case markers, prepositions and voice.

config	layout (pinned)	constituents	with a role	preposition phrases with a role
hebrew	bcv-commons/hebrew-clause-layout v0.37.1 (32f89b71)	146,733	75,896	28,597 of 55,735
greek-nt	bcv-commons/greek-nt-clause-layout v0.7 (9168fac3)	48,186	25,662	7,837 of 9,632

Join a row to its clause by clause_key: the Hebrew layout's clause_key, the Greek layout's first, as in bcv-commons/clause-columns.

Columns

column	in	description
clause_key	both	the layout clause
words	both	the constituent's word ids inside the clause, in text order, space-joined
head	both	its first noun, pronoun, adjective or number word; empty when none
relation	both	the constituent's role in MACULA's tree: s, o, o2, io, p, adv, pp
verb, voice	both	the clause's main verb and voice (clause-columns)
macrorole	both	the verb frame's label for the constituent (MACULA frames: A0, A1, A2, AA); empty when the frame does not list it
case	greek-nt	the head's case
prep, prep_lemma	both	the preposition heading the constituent
prep_ln	greek-nt	the Louw-Nida subdomain of that preposition's sense here (bcv-commons/word-senses)
prep_lxx	hebrew	the Septuagint word MACULA aligns to the Hebrew preposition
lxx_case	hebrew	the case of the Septuagint word aligned to the phrase's first noun (GLAUx)
role	both	the semantic role; empty where the evidence does not decide
role_basis	both	which rule gave it (below)

How the roles are assigned

• frame / frame_passive: the verb frame's A0 is the actor, A1 the undergoer (frame_passive: the passive subject), A2 kept as A2.
• ln (Greek): the Louw-Nida subdomain of the preposition's sense names the role. For example, 90.A agent, 90.B instrument, 84.A source, 84.B goal, 83 location, 67 time, 89.H purpose, 34 accompaniment. With a verb of speaking (Louw-Nida 33), an experiencer or goal is the addressee (ln_speech, +speech).
• Hebrew preposition phrases, in this order:
  • lxx_nt_domain: the Septuagint's preposition, the case of its noun, and the Louw-Nida domain that noun's lemma has in the New Testament. These are read through the New Testament's own (preposition, case, domain) → role table, with at least 8 examples and 60% agreement.
  • lxx_nt: the same without the domain (at least 20 examples, 60%).
  • lxx_dative: לְ that the Septuagint gives as a bare dative is the recipient.
  • hebrew_prep: כְּ is a comparison (standard).
  • hebrew_domain: the Hebrew preposition with its noun's SDBH domain, learned from the rows above.
  • +speech: a goal with אֶל, לְ or עַל after a verb of speaking (אָמַר, דָּבַר, קָרָא, צָוָה, עָנָה ...) is the addressee.

Nothing comes from BHSA or TBTA, and no English text is used as evidence. No row was checked by hand; a human review of samples is planned and will be reported here.

Measured use

A rule-based drafting engine was tested on the Tanakh in six rotating test groups, each drafted by an engine that had not seen it. The figure is the share of right choices where the role changed the engine's choice:

use	Indonesian	Swahili	Tagalog
prepositions chosen by Hebrew preposition and role	+7.4	+16.2	+5.4
Tagalog case markers (ang / ng) by actor and undergoer			+3.6

Word-level F1 of the whole draft against the published translation rises by +0.46 (Indonesian) and +0.85 (Swahili) from the prepositions alone. The Tagalog figure (+0.20) also includes kay / sa chosen by role and by whether the noun refers to a person.

The Greek side has not been measured in drafting yet.

Licence

CC BY-SA 4.0: the Hebrew layout's clause keys, the UBS senses and the GLAUx parses are CC BY-SA 4.0. Credit: MACULA (Clear Bible / Biblica), United Bible Societies (word senses), GLAUx (KU Leuven, Alek Keersmaekers), make-tanakh-research (the measurements), and this dataset.