The goal of this system is to provide a measure of semantic similarity between any two verbs. The VerbOcean dataset contains various semantic relationships for a set of 3477 unique verbs. The pairwise relationships between verbs contained in VerbOcean were used to create a graph of semantic relations between many verbs. A tree traversal algorithm was implemented so that, given a starting word a...

The current study compares lexical association measures for automatic extraction of Estonian particle verbs from the text corpus. The central focus lies on the impact of the corpus size on the performance of the compared symmetrical association measures. Additionally a piece of empirical evidence of the advantage of asymmetric association measure ΔP for the task of collocation extra...

Academic discourse has always been the focus of many linguists, especially those who have been involved with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and discourse analysis. Persuasion, as part of rhetorical structure of academic writing, is partly achieved by employing modality markers.  Adopting a descriptive design, the present study was carried out to compare the use of modality markers in terms...

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb clas...

There is a considerable linguistic debate on whether phrasal verbs (e.g., turn up, break down) are processed as two separate words connected by a syntactic rule or whether they form a single lexical unit. Moreover, views differ on whether meaning (transparency vs. opacity) plays a role in determining their syntactically-connected or lexical status. As linguistic arguments could not settle these...

This paper presents recent work on a new method to automatically extract finegrained duration information for common verbs using a large corpus of Twitter tweets. Regular expressions were used to extract verbs and durations from each tweet in a corpus of more than 14 million tweets with 90.38% precision covering 486 verb lemmas. Descriptive statistics for each verb lemma were found as well as t...

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge...