Measuring Thematic Fit with Distributional Feature Overlap

In this paper, we introduce a new distributional method for modeling predicate-argument thematic fit judgments. We use a syntax-based DSM to build a prototypical representation of verb-specific roles: for every verb, we extract the most salient second order contexts for each of its roles (i.e. the most salient dimensions of typical role fillers), and then we compute thematic fit as a weighted overlap between the top features of candidate fillers and role prototypes. Our experiments show that our method consistently outperforms a baseline re-implementing a state-of-the-art system, and achieves better or comparable results to those reported in the literature for the other unsupervised systems. Moreover, it provides an explicit representation of the features characterizing verb-specific semantic roles.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, EMNLP, 2017, thematic fit, selectional preference, semantic role, DSMs, Distributional Semantic Models, Vector Space Models, VSMs, cosine, APSyn, similarity, prototyp

Commonsense Properties from Query Logs and Question Answering Forums

Commonsense knowledge about object properties, human behavior and general concepts is crucial for robust AI applications. However, automatic acquisition of this knowledge is challenging because of sparseness and bias in online sources. This paper presents Quasimodo, a methodology and tool suite for distilling commonsense properties from non-standard web sources. We devise novel ways of tapping into search-engine query logs and QA forums, and combining the resulting candidate assertions with statistical cues from encyclopedias, books and image tags in a corroboration step. Unlike prior work on commonsense knowledge bases, Quasimodo focuses on salient properties that are typically associated with certain objects or concepts. Extensive evaluations, including extrinsic use-case studies, show that Quasimodo provides better coverage than state-of-the-art baselines with comparable quality

Development of intuitive rules: Evaluating the application of the dual-system framework to understanding children's intuitive reasoning

This is an author-created version of this article. The original source of publication is Psychon Bull Rev. 2006 Dec;13(6):935-53 The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com Published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF0321390