Work

Evaluating Hierarchies of Verb Argument Structure with Hierarchical Clustering

Year: 2017

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Verbs can only be used with a few specific arrangements of their arguments (syntactic frames).Most theorists note that verbs can be organized into a hierarchy of verb classes based on the frames they admit.Here we show that such a hierarchy is objectively well-supported by the patterns of verbs and frames in English, since a systematic hierarchical clustering algorithm converges on the same structure as the handcrafted taxonomy of VerbNet, a broad-coverage verb lexicon.We also show that the hierarchies capture meaningful psychological dimensions of generalization by predicting novel verb coercions by human participants.We discuss limitations of a simple hierarchical representation and suggest similar approaches for identifying the representations underpinning verb argument structure.

Source: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

DOI: 10.18653/v1/d17-1104

Authors: Jesse Mu, Joshua K. Hartshorne, Timothy O'Donnell

Institutions: Boston College, McGill University

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Boston College

OpenAlex ID: W2758819867