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.- Anthology ID:
- D17-1104
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2017
- Address:
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- Editors:
- Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 986–991
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D17-1104
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D17-1104
- Cite (ACL):
- Jesse Mu, Joshua K. Hartshorne, and Timothy O’Donnell. 2017. Evaluating Hierarchies of Verb Argument Structure with Hierarchical Clustering. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 986–991, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Evaluating Hierarchies of Verb Argument Structure with Hierarchical Clustering (Mu et al., EMNLP 2017)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/D17-1104.pdf