The VerbCorner Project: Findings from Phase 1 of crowd-sourcing a semantic decomposition of verbs

Any given verb can appear in some syntactic frames (Sally broke the vase, The vase broke) but not others (*Sally broke at the vase, *Sally broke the vase to John). There is now considerable evidence that the syntactic behaviors of some verbs can be predicted by their meanings, and many current theories posit that this is true for most if not all verbs. If true, this fact would have striking implications for theories and models of language acquisition, as well as numerous applications in natural language processing. However, empirical investigations to date have focused on a small number of verbs. We report on early results from VerbCorner, a crowd-sourced project extending this work to a large, representative sample of English verbs.

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