2 research outputs found
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
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Acquiring and Harnessing Verb Knowledge for Multilingual Natural Language Processing
Advances in representation learning have enabled natural language processing models to derive non-negligible linguistic information directly from text corpora in an unsupervised fashion. However, this signal is underused in downstream tasks, where they tend to fall back on superficial cues and heuristics to solve the problem at hand. Further progress relies on identifying and filling the gaps in linguistic knowledge captured in their parameters. The objective of this thesis is to address these challenges focusing on the issues of resource scarcity, interpretability, and lexical knowledge injection, with an emphasis on the category of verbs.
To this end, I propose a novel paradigm for efficient acquisition of lexical knowledge leveraging native speakers’ intuitions about verb meaning to support development and downstream performance of NLP models across languages. First, I investigate the potential of acquiring semantic verb classes from non-experts through manual clustering. This subsequently informs the development of a two-phase semantic dataset creation methodology, which combines semantic clustering with fine-grained semantic similarity judgments collected through spatial arrangements of lexical stimuli. The method is tested on English and then applied to a typologically diverse sample of languages to produce the first large-scale multilingual verb dataset of this kind. I demonstrate its utility as a diagnostic tool by carrying out a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art NLP models, probing representation quality across languages and domains of verb meaning, and shedding light on their deficiencies. Subsequently, I directly address these shortcomings by injecting lexical knowledge into large pretrained language models. I demonstrate that external manually curated information about verbs’ lexical properties can support data-driven models in tasks where accurate verb processing is key. Moreover, I examine the potential of extending these benefits from resource-rich to resource-poor languages through translation-based transfer. The results emphasise the usefulness of human-generated lexical knowledge in supporting NLP models and suggest that time-efficient construction of lexicons similar to those developed in this work, especially in under-resourced languages, can play an important role in boosting their linguistic capacity.ESRC Doctoral Fellowship [ES/J500033/1], ERC Consolidator Grant LEXICAL [648909