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Gradual Acquisition of Verb Selectional Preferences in a Bayesian Model

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Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition

Abstract

We present a cognitive model of inducing verb selectional preferences from individual verb usages. The selectional preferences for each verb argument are represented as a probability distribution over the set of semantic properties that the argument can possess—a semantic profile. The semantic profiles yield verb-specific conceptualizations of the arguments associated with a syntactic position. The proposed model can learn appropriate verb profiles from a small set of noisy training data, and can use them in simulating human plausibility judgments and analyzing implicit object alternation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This paper is an updated and extended version of preliminary work on this approach presented in [2].

  2. 2.

    Please refer to [3, 4] for more details about the representation framework and the learning mechanisms, and more in-depth discussions about the motivation behind each step.

  3. 3.

    We do not remove alternate spellings of a term in WordNet; this will be seen in the profiles in the results section.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication and Information Studies, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Afra Alishahi

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Suzanne Stevenson

Authors
  1. Afra Alishahi
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  2. Suzanne Stevenson
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Correspondence to Afra Alishahi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves, Porto Alegre, 9500, Brazil

    Aline Villavicencio

  2. Universite Sorbonne Nouvelle, LATTICE-CNRS, Ecole Normale Superieure and, rue d'Ulm 45, Paris, 75005, France

    Thierry Poibeau

  3. Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building, University of Cambridge, Thomson Avenue 15 JJ, Cambridge, CB3 0FD, United Kingdom

    Anna Korhonen

  4. and Communication (TiCC), Tilburg University, Tilburg center for Cognition, Warandelaan 2, Tilburg, 5037, Netherlands

    Afra Alishahi

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Alishahi, A., Stevenson, S. (2013). Gradual Acquisition of Verb Selectional Preferences in a Bayesian Model. In: Villavicencio, A., Poibeau, T., Korhonen, A., Alishahi, A. (eds) Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31863-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31863-4_11

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