@inproceedings{mu-etal-2017-evaluating,
    title = "Evaluating Hierarchies of Verb Argument Structure with Hierarchical Clustering",
    author = "Mu, Jesse  and
      Hartshorne, Joshua K.  and
      O{'}Donnell, Timothy",
    editor = "Palmer, Martha  and
      Hwa, Rebecca  and
      Riedel, Sebastian",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = sep,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Copenhagen, Denmark",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/D17-1104/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/D17-1104",
    pages = "986--991",
    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."
}