Automatic verb classification using multilingual resources

We propose the use of multilingual corpora in the automatic classification of verbs. We extend the work of (Merlo and Stevenson, 2001), in which statistics over simple syntactic features extracted from textual corpora were used to train an automatic classifier for three lexical semantic classes of English verbs. We hypothesize that some lexical semantic features that are difficult to detect superficially in English may manifest themselves as easily extractable surface syntactic features in another language. Our experimental results combining English and Chinese features show that a small bilingual corpus may provide a useful alternative to using a large monolingual corpus for verb classification.