Reclassifying subcategorization frames for experimental analysis and stimulus generation

Paula Buttery, Andrew Caines


Abstract
Researchers in the fields of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics increasingly test their experimental hypotheses against probabilistic models of language. VALEX (Korhonen et al., 2006) is a large-scale verb lexicon that specifies verb usage as probability distributions over a set of 163 verb SUBCATEGORIZATION FRAMES (SCFs). VALEX has proved to be a popular computational linguistic resource and may also be used by psycho- and neurolinguists for experimental analysis and stimulus generation. However, a probabilistic model based upon a set of 163 SCFs often proves too fine grained for experimenters in these fields. Our goal is to simplify the classification by grouping the frames into genera―explainable clusters that may be used as experimental parameters. We adopted two methods for reclassification. One was a manual linguistic approach derived from verb argumentation and clause features; the other was an automatic, computational approach driven from a graphical representation of SCFs. The premise was not only to compare the results of two quite different methods for our own interest, but also to enable other researchers to choose whichever reclassification better suited their purpose (one being grounded purely in theoretical linguistics and the other in practical language engineering). The various classifications are available as an online resource to researchers.
Anthology ID:
L12-1634
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1694–1698
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1063_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paula Buttery and Andrew Caines. 2012. Reclassifying subcategorization frames for experimental analysis and stimulus generation. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1694–1698, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Reclassifying subcategorization frames for experimental analysis and stimulus generation (Buttery & Caines, LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/1063_Paper.pdf