This paper describes an algorithm for propagating verb arguments along lexical chains consisting of WordNet relations. The algorithm creates verb argument structures using VerbNet syntactic patterns. In order to increase the coverage, a larger set of verb senses were automatically associated with the existing patterns from VerbNet. The algorithm is used in an in-house Question Answering system for re-ranking the set of candidate answers. Tests on factoid questions from TREC 2004 indicate that the algorithm improved the system performance by 2.4%.
Adrian Novischi, Dan I. Moldovan