Title
Class-based approach to disambiguating levin verbs
Abstract
Lapata and Brew (Computational Linguistics, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 295–313) (hereafter LB04) obtain from untagged texts a statistical prior model that is able to generate class preferences for ambiguous Lewin (English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation, 1993, University of Chicago Press) verbs (hereafter Levin). They also show that their informative priors, incorporated into a Naive Bayes classifier deduced from hand-tagged data (HTD), can aid in verb class disambiguation. We re-analyse LB04's prior model and show that a single factor (the joint probability of class and frame) determines the predominant class for a particular verb in a particular frame. This means that the prior model cannot be sensitive to fine-grained lexical distinctions between different individual verbs falling in the same class. We replicate LB04's supervised disambiguation experiments on large-scale data, using deep parsers rather than the shallow parser of LB04. In addition, we introduce a method for training our classifier without using HTD. This relies on knowledge of Levin class memberships to move information from unambiguous to ambiguous instances of each class. We regard this system as unsupervised because it does not rely on human annotation of individual verb instances. Although our unsupervised verb class disambiguator does not match the performance of the ones that make use of HTD, it consistently outperforms the random baseline model. Our experiments also demonstrate that the informative priors derived from untagged texts help improve the performance of the classifier trained on untagged data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1017/S1351324910000136
Natural Language Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
different individual verb,informative prior,disambiguating levin verb,verb class disambiguation,untagged text,hereafter lb04,predominant class,prior model,class-based approach,unsupervised verb class disambiguator,class preference,levin class membership
Verb,Annotation,Joint probability distribution,Naive Bayes classifier,Computer science,Computational linguistics,Speech recognition,Artificial intelligence,Natural language processing,Parsing,Classifier (linguistics),Prior probability
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
16
4
1351-3249
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
27
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jianguo Li137735.38
Chris Brew232144.44