An Investigation of Chinese Selectional Preference Based on HowNet

摘要

Selectional Preferences (SPs) in verb-object(VO) constructions have been widely used in NLP applications, such as WSD, metaphor comprehension etc. To estimate the number of verbs that have strong SPs, 38,119 VO types of 1,462 verbs are extracted from "Modern Chinese Cihai", tagged in How Net sense inventory with automatic tagging algorithm, The statistics indicates that only about 50% verbs have strong SPs, while another 50% have to be well analyzed within the cognitive linguistic frames.