In this paper we present word sense disambiguation (WSD) experiments on ten highly polysemous verbs in Chinese, where significant performance improvements are achieved using rich linguistic features. Our system performs significantly better, and in some cases substantially better, than the baseline on all ten verbs. Our results also demonstrate that features extracted from the output of an auto...

this study compares and contrasts tense and inherent aspect in english and persian lan-guage from a semantic and syntactic point of view. the aspectual verb system in both english and persian are semantically interpreted alike. however, in persian a group of stative verbs are grammaticalized by the imperfective obligatory morpheme mi-, while in english all sta-tive verbs perfective. furthermore...

This paper presents a system intended to automatically acquire subcategorization frames (SCFs) of verbs from the analysis of large corpora. The system has been applied to a newspaper corpus (made of 10 years of the French newspaper Le Monde) and acquired subcategorization information for 3267 verbs. 286 SCFs were dynamically learnt for these verbs. From the analysis of 25 representative verbs, ...

We present a supervised method for verb sense disambiguation based on VerbNet. Most previous supervised approaches to verb sense disambiguation create a classifier for each verb that reaches a frequency threshold. These methods, however, have a significant practical problem that they cannot be applied to rare or unseen verbs. In order to overcome this problem, we create a single classifier to b...

Languages differ in how they package the components of an event into words to form sentences. For example, while some languages typically encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., running), others more often use verbs that encode the path (e.g., ascending). Prior research has demonstrated that children and adults have lexicalization biases; that is, they assume that novel motion verbs will...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

In this paper I examine the types of events associated with ditransitive verbs that describe caused possession by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proven fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, sug...

Two or more are sometimes found to co-occur in both Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin Chinese, e.g., jiāyǐ and jìnxíng in duì xuéshēng jiāyǐ jìnxíng yǐndǎo ‘to guide students’, and a particular ordering is often preferred, e.g., jiāyǐ jìnxíng over jìnxíng jiāyǐ. This study argues that the order of the light verbs is closely associated to two kinds of information that the verbs specify, i.e. aspectua...

Logical metonymy combines an event-selecting verb with an entity-denoting noun (e.g., The writer began the novel), triggering a covert event interpretation (e.g., reading, writing). Experimental investigations of logical metonymy must assume a binary distinction between metonymic (i.e. eventselecting) verbs and non-metonymic verbs to establish a control condition. However, this binary distincti...

Do neural systems for planning motor actions play a functional role in understanding action language? Across multiple neuroimaging studies, processing action verbs correlates with somatotopic activity in premotor cortex (PMC). Yet, only one neurostimulation study supports a functional role for PMC in action verb understanding: paradoxically, inhibiting PMC made people respond faster to action v...