Automatic verb classification using distributions of grammatical features

  • Authors:
  • Suzanne Stevenson;Paola Merlo

  • Affiliations:
  • Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ;University of Geneva, Genève, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • EACL '99 Proceedings of the ninth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

We apply machine learning techniques to classify automatically a set of verbs into lexical semantic classes, based on distributional approximations of diatheses, extracted from a very large annotated corpus. Distributions of four grammatical features are sufficient to reduce error rate by 50% over chance. We conclude that corpus data is a usable repository of verb class information, and that corpus-driven extraction of grammatical features is a promising methodology for automatic lexical acquisition.