Unsupervised Discovery of Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs
This addresses a linguistic analysis problem for NLP researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting English unergative and unaccusative verbs without supervision, achieving results comparable to similar approaches while eliminating the need for annotated data.
We present an unsupervised method to detect English unergative and unaccusative verbs. These categories allow us to identify verbs participating in the causative-inchoative alternation without knowing the semantic roles of the verb. The method is based on the generation of intransitive sentence variants of candidate verbs and probing a language model. We obtained results on par with similar approaches, with the added benefit of not relying on annotated resources.