Enabling Transitivity for Lexical Inference on Chinese Verbs Using Probabilistic Soft Logic

To learn more knowledge, enabling transitivity is a vital step for lexical inference. However, most of the lexical inference models with good performance are for nouns or noun phrases, which cannot be directly applied to the inference on events or states. In this paper, we construct the largest Chinese verb lexical inference dataset containing 18,029 verb pairs, where for each pair one of four inference relations are annotated. We further build a probabilistic soft logic (PSL) model to infer verb lexicons using the logic language. With PSL, we easily enable transitivity in two layers, the observed layer and the feature layer, which are included in the knowledge base. We further discuss the effect of transitives within and between these layers. Results show the performance of the proposed PSL model can be improved at least 3.5% (relative) when the transitivity is enabled. Furthermore, experiments show that enabling transitivity in the observed layer benefits the most.