Acquiring Lexical Generalizations from Corpora: A Case Study for Diathesis Alternations

Acquiring Lexical Generalizations from Corpora: A Case Study for Diathesis Alternations Maria Lapata School of Cognitive Science Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, UK mlap@cogsci.ed.ac.uk Abstract This paper examines the extent to which verb diathesis alternations are empirically attested in corpus data. We automatically acquire alternating verbs from large balanced corpora by using partial- parsing methods and taxonomic information, and discuss how corpus data can be used to quantify lin- guistic generalizations. We estimate the productiv- ity of an alternation and the typicality of its mem- bers using type and token frequencies. 1 Introduction Diathesis alternations are changes in the realization of the argument structure of a verb that are some- times accompanied by changes in meaning (Levin, 1993). The phenomenon in English is illustrated in (1)-(2) below. (1) a. John offers shares to his employees. b. John offers his employees shares. (2) a. Leave a note for her. b. Leave her a note. Example (1) illustrates the dative alternation, which is characterized by an alternation between the prepositional frame 'V NP1 to NP2' and the double object frame 'V NP 1 NP2'. The benefactive alterna- tion (cf. (2)) is structurally similar to the dative, the difference being that it involves the preposition for rather than to. Levin (1993) assumes that the syntactic realiza- tion of a verb's arguments is directly correlated with its meaning (cf. also Pinker (1989) for a similar pro- posal). Thus one would expect verbs that undergo the same alternations to form a semantically co- herent class. Levin's study on diathesis alternations has influenced recent work on word sense disam- biguation (Dorr and Jones, 1996), machine transla- tion (Dang et al., 1998), and automatic lexical ac- quisition (McCarthy and Korhonen, 1998; Schulte im Walde, 1998). The objective of this paper is to investigate the ex- tent to which diathesis alternations are empirically attested in corpus data. Using the dative and bene- factive alternations as a test case we attempt to de- termine: (a) if some alternations are more frequent than others, (b) if alternating verbs have frame pref- erences and (c) what the representative members of an alternation are. In section 2 we describe and evaluate the set of automatic methods we used to acquire verbs under- going the dative and benefactive alternations. We assess the acquired frames using a filtering method presented in section 3. The results are detailed in section 4. Sections 5 and 6 discuss how the derived type and token frequencies can be used to estimate how productive an alternation is for a given verb se- mantic class and how typical its members are. Fi- nally, section 7 offers some discussion on future work and section 8 conclusive remarks. 2 Method 2.1 The parser The part-of-speech tagged version of the British Na- tional Corpus (BNC), a 100 million word collec- tion of written and spoken British English (Burnard, 1995), was used to acquire the frames characteris- tic of the dative and benefactive alternations. Sur- face syntactic …

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