Gradual Acquisition of Verb Selectional Preferences in a Bayesian Model

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.

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