Latent Variable Models of Selectional Preference

Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha

Abstract: This paper describes the application of so-called topic models to selectional preference induction. Three models related to Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a proven method for modelling document-word cooccurrences, are presented and evaluated on datasets of human plausibility judgements. Compared to previously proposed techniques, these models perform very competitively, especially for infrequent predicate-argument combinations where they exceed the quality of Web-scale predictions while using relatively little data.