Unsupervised Discovery of Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs

Sharid Loáiciga, Luca Bevacqua, Christian Hardmeier

Abstract: We present an unsupervised method to detect English unergative and unaccusative verbs. These categories allow us to identify verbs participating in the causative-inchoative alternation without knowing the semantic roles of the verb. The method is based on the generation of intransitive sentence variants of candidate verbs and probing a language model. We obtained results on par with similar approaches, with the added benefit of not relying on annotated resources.