Selection Restrictions Acquisition from Corpora

摘要

This paper describes an automatic clustering strategy for acquiring selection restrictions. We use a knowledge-poor method merely based on word cooccurrence within basic syntactic constructions; hence, neither semantic tagged corpora nor man-made lexical resources are needed for generalising semantic restrictions. Our strategy relies on two basic linguistic assumptions. First, we assume that two syntactically related words impose semantic selectional restrictions to each other (co-specification). Second, it is also claimed that two syntactic contexts impose the same selection restrictions if they cooccur with the same words (contextual hypothesis). In order to test our learning method, preliminary experiments have been performed on a Portuguese corpus.