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Doctoral thesis
Open access
English

Dynamics, causation, duration in the predicate-argument structure of verbs : a computational approach based on parallel corpora

ContributorsSamardzic, Tanja
DirectorsMerlo, Paola
Defense date2013-12-20
Abstract

This dissertation addresses systematic variation in the use of verbs where two syntactically different sentences are used to express the same event. We show that the frequency distribution of the syntactic alternants depends on the meaning of the verbs: force dynamics in light verb constructions, external causation in lexical causatives, and duration in verb aspect classes. Both intra-linguistic and cross-linguistic variation in morphological and syntactic realisations of semantically equivalent items are taken into account by analysing data extracted from parallel corpora. The three semantic properties are empirically induced on the basis of the observations automatically extracted from large parallel corpora, which are automatically parsed and word-aligned. The generalisations are learned from the extracted data automatically using statistical inferences and machine learning techniques. The accuracy of the predictions made on the basis of the generalisations is assessed experimentally on an independent set of test instances.

eng
Keywords
  • Verb meaning
  • Predicate-argument structure
  • Parallel corpora
  • Large-scale data
  • Automatic processing
  • Statistical modelling
  • Bayesian modelling
Funding
  • Swiss National Science Foundation - Corpus-based Explorations of Cross-linguistic Syntactic and Semantic Role Parallelism (FNS No. 122643)
Citation (ISO format)
SAMARDZIC, Tanja. Dynamics, causation, duration in the predicate-argument structure of verbs : a computational approach based on parallel corpora. 2013. doi: 10.13097/archive-ouverte/unige:38422
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