Disambiguating Verbs by Collocation: Corpus Lexicography meets Natural Language Processing

This paper reports the results of Natural Language Processing (NLP) experiments in semantic parsing, based on a new semantic resource, the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV) (Hanks, 2013). This work is set in the DVC (Disambiguating Verbs by Collocation) project aimed at expanding PDEV to a large scale. This project springs from a long-term collaboration of lexicographers with computer scientists which has given rise to the design and maintenance of specific, adapted, and user-friendly editing and exploration tools. Particular attention is drawn on the use of NLP deep semantic methods to help in data processing. Possible contributions for NLP include pattern disambiguation, the focus of this article. The present article explains how PDEV differs from other lexical resources and describes its structure in detail. It also presents new classification experiments on a subset of 25 verbs. The SVM model obtained a micro-average F1 score of 0.81.