# Aspectuality Across Genre: A Distributional Semantics Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00345/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 31 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Kind Introduction to Lexical and Grammatical Aspect, with a Survey of Computational Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.09012/) (2022)
- [The Imperfective Paradox in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09373/) (2026)
- [Zero-shot Cross-Linguistic Learning of Event Semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02356/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Structured Meaning Representations with Aspect Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24797/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences. We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and telic vs. atelic events, can be modelled effectively with distributional semantics. We find that a verb's local context is most indicative of its aspectual class, and demonstrate that closed class words tend to be stronger discriminating contexts than content words. Our approach outperforms previous work on three datasets. Lastly, we contribute a dataset of human--human conversations annotated with lexical aspect and present experiments that show the correlation of telicity with genre and discourse goals.