An REF method that extracts and composes predicates, relations, and superlatives from a dependency parse

The "Annotating Relations and Events in FrameNet" (REF) method is designed to extract and analyze predicate-argument structures from dependency parses, which are syntactic representations of sentences. It focuses on identifying not only the main verb (predicate) but also its associated arguments and potential modifiers such as relations and superlatives.

To demonstrate this process, let's assume we have a sentence parsed using a dependency parser like Stanford Parser or spaCy[^4]:

from spacy import displacy
nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_sm')

sentence = "The big red car drove quickly down the street."
doc = nlp(sentence)

# Extracting predicate, relation, and superlative information
for token in doc:
    if token.dep_ == 'amod':  # adjective modifying noun (superlative)
        print(f"Superlative: {token.text} modifies {token.head.text}")
    elif token.dep_ in ('pobj', 'dobj'):  # direct object or indirect object
        print(f"Argument: {token.text} is an argument of {token.head.text}")
    elif token.dep_ == 'advmod':  # adverb modifying verb (relation)
        print(f"Relation: {token.text} modifies the verb {token.head.text}")

displacy.render(doc, style='dep')

In this example, `displacy.render(doc, style='dep')` would display the dependency tree, helping to visualize these relationships[^4].