Corpus-based Acquisition of German Event- and Object-Denoting Nouns

This paper presents a simple distributional method for acquiring event-denoting and object-denoting nouns from corpora. Its core is a bootstrapping cycle that alternates between acquiring new instances and new features, using a simple log odds ratio for fil-tering. We acquire 3000 German nouns for each class with precisions of 93 % (events) and 98 % (objects), respectively. 1 Events and Objects While the majority of nouns in English and related languages refer to objects, either physical (book) or abstract (idea), some nouns refer to events and states (christening, happiness).