Cross-Language Acquisition of Semantic Models for Verbal Predicates

Jordi Atserias, Bernardo Magnini, Octavian Popescu, Eneko Agirre, Aitziber Atutxa, German Rigau, John A. Carroll, Rob Koeling

Abstract: This paper presents a semantic-driven methodology for the automatic acquisition of verbal models. Our approach relies strongly on the semantic generalizations allowed by already existing resources (e.g. Domain labels, Named Entity categories, concepts in the SUMO ontology, etc). Several experiments have been carried out using comparable corpora in four languages (Italian, Spanish, Basque and English) and two domains (FINANCE and SPORT) showing that the semantic patterns acquired can be general enough to be ported from one language to the other language.