Detecting the Organization of Semantic Subclasses of Japanese Verbs

This paper describes an approach to detect the organization of semantic subclasses of Japanese verbs. First, we classify verbs along two dimensions: thematic and aspectual. In the thematic dimension, we exploit the pattern of case marking particles which are attached to arguments of verbs. In the aspectual dimension, we exploit the classification of adverbs which modify verbs in a corpus. By combining the results of two classifications, we obtain an elaborate classification of verbs. We can incorporate the prototypicality of the members which constitute each semantic subclass by taking account of the frequency of case particles patterns and cooccurring adverbs. Moreover, the existence of close relationships among them enable us to detect the organization of these subclasses.