Automatic Acquisition of the Lexical Semantics of Verbs from Sentence Frames

This paper presents a computational model ofverb acquisitionwhich uses what we willcallthe principle of structured overeommitment to eliminate the need for negative evidence. The learner escapes from the need to be told that certain possibilities cannot occur (i.e.,are "ungrammatical") by one simple expedient: It assumes that allproperties it has observed are either obligatory or forbidden until it sees otherwise, at which point it decides that what it thought was either obligatory or forbidden is merely optional. This model is built upon a classificationof verbs based upon a simple three-valued set of features which represents key aspects of a verb's syntactic structure, its predicate/argument structure, and the mapping between them.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1989
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Mort Webster, Mitchell P. Marcus
• Keywords: ACL 1989, ACL 2007, Computational Model Ofverb, Simple Three-valued Set, Verb's Syntactic Structure