Learning Syntactic Verb Frames using Graphical Models

We present a novel approach for building verb subcategorization lexicons using a simple graphical model. In contrast to previous methods, we show how the model can be trained without parsed input or a predefined subcategorization frame inventory. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on a verb clustering task, and is easily trained on arbitrary domains. This quantitative evaluation is complemented by a qualitative discussion of verbs and their frames. We discuss the advantages of graphical models for this task, in particular the ease of integrating semantic information about verbs and arguments in a principled fashion. We conclude with future work to augment the approach.