2,209 research outputs found
Disambiguating Nouns, Verbs, and Adjectives Using Automatically Acquired Selectional Preferences
Selectional preferences have been used by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems as one source of disambiguating information. We evaluate WSD using selectional preferences acquired for English adjective—noun, subject, and direct object grammatical relationships with respect to a standard test corpus. The selectional preferences are specific to verb or adjective classes, rather than individual word forms, so they can be used to disambiguate the co-occurring adjectives and verbs, rather than just the nominal argument heads. We also investigate use of the one-senseper-discourse heuristic to propagate a sense tag for a word to other occurrences of the same word within the current document in order to increase coverage. Although the preferences perform well in comparison with other unsupervised WSD systems on the same corpus, the results show that for many applications, further knowledge sources would be required to achieve an adequate level of accuracy and coverage. In addition to quantifying performance, we analyze the results to investigate the situations in which the selectional preferences achieve the best precision and in which the one-sense-per-discourse heuristic increases performance
Deriving Verb Predicates By Clustering Verbs with Arguments
Hand-built verb clusters such as the widely used Levin classes (Levin, 1993)
have proved useful, but have limited coverage. Verb classes automatically
induced from corpus data such as those from VerbKB (Wijaya, 2016), on the other
hand, can give clusters with much larger coverage, and can be adapted to
specific corpora such as Twitter. We present a method for clustering the
outputs of VerbKB: verbs with their multiple argument types, e.g.
"marry(person, person)", "feel(person, emotion)." We make use of a novel
low-dimensional embedding of verbs and their arguments to produce high quality
clusters in which the same verb can be in different clusters depending on its
argument type. The resulting verb clusters do a better job than hand-built
clusters of predicting sarcasm, sentiment, and locus of control in tweets
Can Subcategorisation Probabilities Help a Statistical Parser?
Research into the automatic acquisition of lexical information from corpora
is starting to produce large-scale computational lexicons containing data on
the relative frequencies of subcategorisation alternatives for individual
verbal predicates. However, the empirical question of whether this type of
frequency information can in practice improve the accuracy of a statistical
parser has not yet been answered. In this paper we describe an experiment with
a wide-coverage statistical grammar and parser for English and
subcategorisation frequencies acquired from ten million words of text which
shows that this information can significantly improve parse accuracy.Comment: 9 pages, uses colacl.st
Process nominalizations in russian
Within a minimalist framework of sound-meaning correlation, the present study concentrates on process nominalizations of Russian. It is shown how these constructions are built up syntactically and semantically and in which respects they differ from other types of nominalizations. The analysis follows a lexicalist conception of word formation and the differentiation of Semantic Form and Conceptual Structure
On nonprimary selectional restrictions
This paper argues for non-primary c- and s-selectional restrictions of verbs in computing nonprimary predicatives such as resultatives, depictives, and manners. Our discussion is based both on the selection violations in the presence of nonprimary predicates and on the cross-linguistic and language-internal variations of categorial and semantic constraints on nonprimary predicates. We claim that all types of thematic predication are represented by an extended projection, and that the merger of lexical heads with another element, regardless of the type of the element, consistently has c- and s-selectional restrictions
Verb Physics: Relative Physical Knowledge of Actions and Objects
Learning commonsense knowledge from natural language text is nontrivial due
to reporting bias: people rarely state the obvious, e.g., "My house is bigger
than me." However, while rarely stated explicitly, this trivial everyday
knowledge does influence the way people talk about the world, which provides
indirect clues to reason about the world. For example, a statement like, "Tyler
entered his house" implies that his house is bigger than Tyler.
In this paper, we present an approach to infer relative physical knowledge of
actions and objects along five dimensions (e.g., size, weight, and strength)
from unstructured natural language text. We frame knowledge acquisition as
joint inference over two closely related problems: learning (1) relative
physical knowledge of object pairs and (2) physical implications of actions
when applied to those object pairs. Empirical results demonstrate that it is
possible to extract knowledge of actions and objects from language and that
joint inference over different types of knowledge improves performance.Comment: 11 pages, published in Proceedings of ACL 201
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