We present a cognitive model of inducing verb selectional preferences from individual verb usages. The selectional preferences for each verb argument are represented as a probability distribution over the set of semantic properties that the argument can possess—a semantic profile. The semantic profiles yield verb-specific conceptualizations of the arguments associated with a syntactic position....

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” ...

Background: Many studies report that the comprehension of sentences derived by movement of phrases is impaired in agrammatism. However, only few studies have explored the comprehension of sentences that involve a movement of the verb. In several languages, the verb can or should move to the second position of a sentence, creating VSO sentences like ‘‘Yesterday ate the girl a watermelon’’ from a...