Corpus Patterns for Semantic Processing

Octavian Popescu, Patrick Hanks, Elisabetta Jezek, Daisuke Kawahara

Abstract: This tutorial presents a corpus-driven, pattern-based empirical approach to meaning representation and computation. Patterns in text are everywhere, but techniques for identifying and processing them are still rudimentary. Patterns are not merely syntactic but syntagmatic: each pattern identifies a lexico-semantic clause structure consisting of a predicator (verb or predicative adjective) together with open-ended lexical sets of collocates in different clause roles (subject, object, prepositional argument, etc.). If NLP is to make progress in identifying and processing text meaning, pattern recognition and collocational analysis will play an essential role, because: