English

Unsupervised Discovery of Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs

Computation and Language 2021-11-02 v1

Abstract

We present an unsupervised method to detect English unergative and unaccusative verbs. These categories allow us to identify verbs participating in the causative-inchoative alternation without knowing the semantic roles of the verb. The method is based on the generation of intransitive sentence variants of candidate verbs and probing a language model. We obtained results on par with similar approaches, with the added benefit of not relying on annotated resources.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.00808,
  title  = {Unsupervised Discovery of Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs},
  author = {Sharid Loáiciga and Luca Bevacqua and Christian Hardmeier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.00808},
  year   = {2021}
}