Acquiring Inference Rules with Temporal Constraints by Using Japanese Coordinated Sentences and Noun-Verb Co-occurrences

This paper shows that inference rules with temporal constraints can be acquired by using verb-verb co-occurrences in Japanese coordinated sentences and verb-noun cooccurrences. For example, our unsupervised acquisition method could obtain the inference rule “If someone enforces a law, usually someone enacts the law at the same time as or before the enforcing of the law” since the verbs “enact” and “enforce” frequently co-occurred in coordinated sentences and the verbs also frequently cooccurred with the noun “law”. We also show that the accuracy of the acquisition is improved by using the occurrence frequency of a single verb, which we assume indicates how generic the meaning of the verb is.