Incorporating Coercive Constructions into a Verb Lexicon.

We take the first steps towards augmenting a lexical resource, VerbNet, with probabilistic information about coercive constructions. We focus on Causedmotion as an example construction occurring with verbs for which it is a typical usage or for which it must be interpreted as extending the event semantics through coercion, which occurs productively and adds substantially to the relational semantics of a verb. However, through annotation we find that VerbNet fails to accurately capture all usages of the construction. We use unsupervised methods to estimate probabilistic measures from corpus data for predicting usage of the construction across verb classes in the lexicon and evaluate against VerbNet. We discuss how these methods will form the basis for enhancements for VerbNet supporting more accurate analysis of the relational semantics of a verb across productive usages.