Bengali Verb Subcategorization Frame Acquisition - A Baseline Model

Acquisition of verb subcategorization frames is important as verbs generally take different types of relevant arguments associated with each phrase in a sentence in comparison to other parts of speech categories. This paper presents the acquisition of different subcategorization frames for a Bengali verb Kara (do). It generates compound verbs in Bengali when combined with various noun phrases. The main hypothesis here is that the subcategorization frames for a Bengali verb are same with the subcategorization frames for its equivalent English verb with an identical sense tag. Syntax plays the main role in the acquisition of Bengali verb subcategorization frames. The output frames of the Bengali verbs have been compared with the frames of the equivalent English verbs identified using a Bengali-English bilingual lexicon. The flexible ordering of different phrases, additional attachment of optional phrases in Bengali sentences make this frames acquisition task challenging. This system has demonstrated precision and recall values of 77.11% and 88.23% respectively on a test set of 100 sentences.