Coarse Lexical Frame Acquisition at the Syntax–Semantics Interface Using a Latent-Variable PCFG Model

Laura Kallmeyer, Behrang QasemiZadeh, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung


Abstract
We present a method for unsupervised lexical frame acquisition at the syntax–semantics interface. Given a set of input strings derived from dependency parses, our method generates a set of clusters that resemble lexical frame structures. Our work is motivated not only by its practical applications (e.g., to build, or expand the coverage of lexical frame databases), but also to gain linguistic insight into frame structures with respect to lexical distributions in relation to grammatical structures. We model our task using a hierarchical Bayesian network and employ tools and methods from latent variable probabilistic context free grammars (L-PCFGs) for statistical inference and parameter fitting, for which we propose a new split and merge procedure. We show that our model outperforms several baselines on a portion of the Wall Street Journal sentences that we have newly annotated for evaluation purposes.
Anthology ID:
S18-2016
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Jonathan Berant, Alessandro Lenci
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGSEM | SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
130–141
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S18-2016
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S18-2016
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Laura Kallmeyer, Behrang QasemiZadeh, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. 2018. Coarse Lexical Frame Acquisition at the Syntax–Semantics Interface Using a Latent-Variable PCFG Model. In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, pages 130–141, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coarse Lexical Frame Acquisition at the Syntax–Semantics Interface Using a Latent-Variable PCFG Model (Kallmeyer et al., *SEM 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/S18-2016.pdf
Data
FrameNet