Manual development of large subcategorised lexicons has proved difficult because predicates change behaviour between sublanguages, domains and over time. Yet access to a comprehensive subcategorization lexicon is vital for successful parsing capable of recovering predicate-argument relations, and probabilistic parsers would greatly benefit from accurate information concerning the relative likelihood of different subcategorisation frames (scfs) of a given predicate. Acquisition of subcategorization lexicons from textual corpora has recently become increasingly popular. Although this work has met with some success, resulting lexicons indicate a need for greater accuracy. One significant source of error lies in the statistical filtering used for hypothesis selection, i.e. for removing noise from automatically acquired scfs. This thesis builds on earlier work in verbal subcategorization acquisition, taking as a starting point the problem with statistical filtering. Our investigation shows that statistical filters tend to work poorly because not only is the underlying distribution zipfian, but there is also very little correlation between conditional distribution of

This thesis develops a new approach to automatic language generation that focuses on the need to produce a range of different paraphrases from the same input representation. One novelty of the system is its solidly grounding representations of word meaning in a background knowledge base, which enables the production of paraphrases stemming from certain inferences, rather than from purely lexical relationships alone. The system is designed in such a way that the paraphrasing mechanism extends naturally to a multilingual generator; specifically, we will be concerned with producing English and German sentences. The focus of the system is on lexical paraphrases, and one of the contributions of the thesis is in identifying, analyzing and extending relevant linguistic research so that it can be used to handle...

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. Our goal is to construct large-scale lexicons for interlingual MT of English, Arabic, Korean, and Spanish. We describe techniques that predict salient linguistic features of a nonEnglish word using the features of its English gloss (i.e., translation) in a bilingual dictionary. While not exact, owing to inexact glosses and language-to-language variations, these techniques can augmentan existing dictionary with reasonable accuracy, thus saving significant time. We have conducted two experiments that demonstrate the value of these techniques. The first tested the feasibility of building a database of thematic grids for over 6500 Arabic verbs based on a mapping between English glosses and the syntactic codes in Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) (Procter, 1978). We show that it is more efficient and less error-prone to hand-verify the automatically constructed grids than it would be to build the thematic grids by hand from scratch. The second experiment tested the auto...

lexicons from machine-readable resources. We describe semantic filters designed to reduce the number of incorrect assignments (i.e., improve precision) made by a purely syntactic technique. We demonstrate that it is possible to use these filters to build broad-coverage lexicons with minimal effort, at a depth of knowledge that lies at the syntax-semantics interface. We report on our results of disambiguating the verbs in the semantic filters by adding WordNet sense annotations. We then show the results of our classification on unknown words and we evaluate these results.

We challenge the predominant view of the English dative alternation, which takes all alternating verbs to have two meanings: a caused possession meaning realized by the double object variant and a caused motion meaning realized by the to variant. Instead, we argue that verbs like give and sell only have a caused possession meaning, while verbs like throw and send have both caused motion and caused possession meanings. We show that the caused possession meaning may be realized by both variants. Concomitantly, we argue that verbs like give, even in the to variant, lack a conceptual path constituent, and instead have a caused possession meaning which can be understood as the bringing about of a ‘have ’ relation. We reassess evidence for alternative approaches adduced from inference patterns and verb–argument combinations and demonstrate how our verb-sensitive analysis, when combined with an account of variant choice, provides a more insightful explanation of this data, while having wider coverage. Our investigation affirms proposals that a verb’s own meaning plays a key role in determining its argument realization options. To conclude, we consider the crosslinguistic implications of our study, attempting to explain why so

. This paper describes and discusses some theoretical and practical problems arising from developing a system to combine the structured but incomplete information from machine readable dictionaries (MRDs) with the unstructured but more complete information available in corpora for the creation of a bilingual lexical data base, presenting a methodology to integrate information from both sources into a single lexical data structure. The bicord system (BIlingual CORpus-enhanced Dictionaries) involves linking entries in Collins English-French and FrenchEnglish bilingual dictionary with a large English-French and French-English bilingual corpus. We have concentrated on the class of action verbs of movement, building on earlier work on lexical correspondences specific to this verb class between languages (Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1989), (Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1990a), (Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1990b). 1 We first examine the way prototypical verbs of movement are translated in the Collin...

To the extent that the human sentence processing mechanism attempts to assign a structure and an interpretation to incoming material word-by-word as soon as it is encountered, one can ask how it decides which structure to assign upon encountering a partial sentence like "The spy saw the cop with": which attachment will it choose for the PP containing "with"? That is the question I explore in this paper.

this paper we will only propose them for universal principles, though there are some intriguing possibilities for language-particular application as well. But to make serious proposals along these lines, one would need to have a restrictive theory of what kinds of conditionals are found in natural-language grammars, something we will not attempt to provide here.

annotated the verbal argument structure for the Wall Street Journal Corpus of the Penn Treebank (PTB). This document outlines a new effort, called NomBank,