Language and Computation introductory course:
Corpus-Based Argument Structure.

Teacher Abstract:

The aim of the course is twofold. The linguistic goal is to discuss the notion of argument structure (valence) both from the syntactic and from the semantic point of view, with some emphasis on the argument/adjunct dichotomy and diathesis (argument alternations). The computational goal is to present diverse techniques of learning valence information from corpora. This automatic learning task is usually split into two stages: the linguistic stage of collecting information about the co-occurrence of argument-taking lexemes and various types of phrases (possible arguments), and the statistical inference stage at which reliable valence hypotheses are selected. Both stages will be discussed in detail. The course will conclude with the presentation of various evaluation methods and various uses of automatically extracted valence information. The closing bracket of the course will be the discussion of the extent to which automatic valence acquisition can help in distinguishing arguments from adjuncts.