An Unsupervised Model for Instance Level Subcategorization Acquisition

Most existing systems for subcategorization frame (SCF) acquisition rely on supervised parsing and infer SCF distributions at type, rather than instance level. These systems suffer from poor portability across domains and their benefit for NLP tasks that involve sentence-level processing is limited. We propose a new unsupervised, Markov Random Field-based model for SCF acquisition which is designed to address these problems. The system relies on supervised POS tagging rather than parsing, and is capable of learning SCFs at instance level. We perform evaluation against gold standard data which shows that our system outperforms several supervised and type-level SCF baselines. We also conduct task-based evaluation in the context of verb similarity prediction, demonstrating that a vector space model based on our SCFs substantially outperforms a lexical model and a model based on a supervised parser 1 .