Joshua K. Hartshorne


2017

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Evaluating Hierarchies of Verb Argument Structure with Hierarchical Clustering
Jesse Mu | Joshua K. Hartshorne | Timothy O’Donnell
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

2014

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The VerbCorner Project: Findings from Phase 1 of crowd-sourcing a semantic decomposition of verbs
Joshua K. Hartshorne | Claire Bonial | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2013

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The VerbCorner Project: Toward an Empirically-Based Semantic Decomposition of Verbs
Joshua K. Hartshorne | Claire Bonial | Martha Palmer
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing