Predicting Semantics from Syntactic Cues -- An Evaluation of Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations

Abstract

The relationship between the meaning of verbs and their syntactic patterns has recently been explored in the landmark study of (Levin, 1993). Although the central thesis of this book is that verb semantics and syntactic behavior are predictably related, the large scope of the work makes it difficult to verify. I show that it is possible to guess the semantic class of a verb based on syntactic cues automatically extracted from the example sentences in her book. In particular, it is possible to correctly guess 94.8% of Levin's semantic classes if the parses contain prepositions, negative evidence is included, and word senses are disambiguated. This report includes the syntactic signatures of Levin's 191 semantic classes, in addition to a detailed description of how the syntactic signatures behave according to the different parameters involving negative evidence, prepositions, and disambiguation. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-121)