A step-wise usage-based method for inducing polysemy-aware verb classes

Abstract

We present an unsupervised method for inducing verb classes from verb uses in gigaword corpora. Our method consists of two clustering steps: verb-specific semantic frames are first induced by clustering verb uses in a corpus and then verb classes are induced by clustering these frames. By taking this step-wise approach, we can not only generate verb classes based on a massive amount of verb uses in a scalable manner, but also deal with verb polysemy, which is bypassed by most of the previous studies on verb clustering. In our experiments, we acquire semantic frames and verb classes from two giga-word corpora, the larger comprising 20 billion words. The effectiveness of our approach is verified through quantitative evaluations based on polysemy-aware gold-standard data. © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics.