SPred: Large-scale Harvesting of Semantic Predicates

We present SPred, a novel method for the creation of large repositories of semantic predicates. We start from existing collocations to form lexical predicates (e.g., break ∗) and learn the semantic classes that best fit the ∗ argument. To do this, we extract all the occurrences in Wikipedia which match the predicate and abstract its arguments to general semantic classes (e.g., break BODY PART, break AGREEMENT, etc.). Our experiments show that we are able to create a large collection of semantic predicates from the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary with high precision and recall, and perform well against the most similar approach.