Supervised Classification of Aspectual Verb Classes in German - Subcategorization-Frame-Based vs Window-Based Approach: A Comparison

Jürgen Hermes, Michael Richter, Claes Neuefeind

Abstract: The present study examines the results of two experiments: the aspectual classification of German verbs within a window-based distributional framework and the classification within a subcategorization-frame-based framework. The predictive power of pure, unstructured co-occurrences of verbs is compared against that of linguistically motivated, well defined co-occurrences which we denote as informed distributional framework. Using a support vector machine classifier and a classification into an extended Vendler classification (Vendler, 1967) as the gold standard, we observe excellent results in both frameworks which perform almost on a par.