Towards a semantic classification of Spanish verbs based on subcategorisation information

Abstract

We present experiments aiming at an automatic classification of Spanish verbs into lexical semantic classes. We apply well-known techniques that have been developed for the English language to Spanish, proving that empirical methods can be re-used through languages without substantial changes in the methodology. Our results on subcategorisation acquisition compare favourably to the state of the art for English. For the verb classification task, we use a hierarchical clustering algorithm, and we compare the output clusters to a manually constructed classification.