Automatic Acquisition of Artifact Nouns in French

This article describes a method which allows acquiring artifact nouns in French automatically by extracting predicateargument structures. Two strategies are presented: the supervised strategy and the semi-supervised strategy. In the supervised method, the semantic classes of artifact nouns are recognized by identifying the predicate-argument structures with the syntactic patterns of the given predicates. In the semi-supervised method, the extraction of predicate-argument structures is carried out from a semantic class of artifact nouns given in advance. The predicate candidates obtained from extracted predicate-argument structures are then intersected. Next, the syntactic patterns of predicates are automatically learned by probabilistic calculation. With the acquired predicates and the learned syntactic patterns, more artifact nouns are identified.