Subcategorization Acquisition and Evaluation for Chinese Verbs

Subcategorization Acquisition and Evaluation for Chinese Verbs Xiwu Han, Tiejun Zhao, Haoliang Qi, Hao Yu Department of Computer Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, 150001 Harbin, China {hxw, tjzhao, qhl, yh}@mtlab.hit.edu.cn Abstract This paper describes the technology and an ex- periment of subcategorization acquisition for Chinese verbs. The SCF hypotheses are gener- ated by means of linguistic heuristic information and filtered via statistical methods. Evaluation on the acquisition of 20 multi-pattern verbs shows that our experiment achieved the similar precision and recall with former researches. Be- sides, simple application of the acquired lexicon to a PCFG parser indicates great potentialities of subcategorization information in the fields of NLP. Credits This research is sponsored by National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 60373101 and 603750 19), and High-Tech Research and Devel- opment Program (Grant No. 2002AA117010-09). Introduction Since (Brent 1991) there have been a consider- able amount of researches focusing on verb lexi- cons with respective subcategorization informa- tion specified both in the field of traditional lin- guistics and that of computational linguistics. As for the former, subcategory theories illustrating the syntactic behaviors of verbal predicates are now much more systemically improved, e.g. (Korhonen 2001). And for auto-acquisition and relevant application, researchers have made great achievements not only in English, e.g. (Briscoe and Carroll 1997), (Korhonen 2003), but also in many other languages, such as Germany (Schulte im Walde 2002), Czech (Sarkar and Zeman 2000), and Portuguese (Gamallo et. al 2002). However, relevant theoretical researches on Chinese verbs are generally limited to case gram- mar, valency, some semantic computation theo- ries, and a few papers on manual acquisition or prescriptive designment of syntactic patterns. Due to irrelevant initial motivations, syntactic and semantic generalizabilities of the consequent outputs are not in such a harmony that satisfies the description granularity for SCF (Han and Zhao 2004). The only auto-acquisition work for Chinese SCF made by (Han and Zhao 2004) de- scribes the predefinition of 152 general frames for all verbs in Chinese, but that experiment is not based on real corpus. After observing and analyzing quantity of subcategory phenomena in real Chinese corpus in the People’s Daily (Jan.~June, 1998), we removed from Han & Zhao’s predefinition 15 SCFs that are actually similar derivants of others, and then with this foundation and linguistic rules from (Zhao 2002) as heuristic information we generated SCF hy- potheses from the corpus of People’s Daily (Jan.~June, 1998), and statistically filtered the hypotheses into a Chinese verb SCF lexicon. As far as we know, this is the first attempt of Chi- nese SCF auto-acquisition based on real corpus. In the rest of this paper, the second section de- scribes a comprehensive system that builds verb SCF lexicons from large real corpus, the respec- tive operating principles, and the knowledge coded in our SCF. The third section analyzed the acquired lexicon with two experiments: one evaluated the acquisition results of 20 verbs with multi syntactic patterns against manual gold standard; the other checked the performance of the lexicon when applied in a …

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