Experiments on the Choice of Features for Learning Verb Classes

The choice of verb features is crucial for the learning of verb classes. This paper presents clustering experiments on 168 German verbs, which explore the relevance of features on three levels of verb description, purely syntactic frame types, prepositional phrase information and selectional preferences. In contrast to previous approaches concentrating on the sparse data problem, we present evidence for a linguistically defined limit on the usefulness of features which is driven by the idiosyncratic properties of the verbs and the specific attributes of the desired verb classification.