Acquisition of Qualia Elements from Corpora - Evaluation of a Symbolic Learning Method

Pierrette Bouillon (TIM/ISSCO - ETI, University of Geneva, 40 Bvd du Pont-d'Arve, CH-1205 Geneva, Switzerland)

Vincent Claveau (IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu, 35000 Rennes, France)

Pascale Sébillot (IRISA, Campus de Beaulieu, 35000 Rennes, France)

Cécile Fabre (ERSS, University of Toulouse II, 5, allées A. Machado, 31058 Toulouse cedex, France)

WO3: Acquisition Of Lexical Information

This paper presents and evaluates a system extracting from a corpus noun-verb pairs hose components are related by a special kind of link: the qualia roles as defined in the  Generative Lexicon. This system is based on a symbolic learning method that automatically learns, from noun-verb pairs that are or are not related by a qualia link, rules characterizing positive examples from negative ones in terms of their surrounding part-of-speech or semantic contexts. The qualia noun-verb pair extraction is thus performed by applying the learnt rules on a part-of-speech or semantically tagged text. Stress is put on the quality of the learning when compared with traditional statistical or syntactical-based approaches. The linguistic relevance of the rules is also evaluated through a comparison with manually acquired qualia patterns. 

Lexical semantic information extraction, Inductive logic programming, Evaluation

100.pdf