A cognitive model for the representation and acquisition of verb selectional preferences
Afra Alishahi, Suzanne Stevenson · 2007
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. The proposed model can learn appropriate verb profiles from a small set of noisy training data, and can use them in simulating human plausibility judgments and analyzing implicit object alternation.