Identification of caused motion constructions

Abstract

This research describes the development of a supervised classifier of English Caused Motion Constructions (CMCs) (e.g. The goalie kicked the ball into the field). Consistent identification of CMCs is a necessary step to a correct interpretation of semantics for sentences where the verb does not conform to the expected semantics of the verb (e.g. The crowd laughed the clown off the stage). We expand on a previous study on the classification CMCs (Hwang et al., 2010) to show that CMCs can be successfully identified in the corpus data. In this paper, we present the classifier and the series of experiments carried out to improve its performance.