An unsupervised algorithm for the induction of constructions

Abstract

We present an approach to the unsupervised induction of constructions for a specific domain. The main features of our approach are that i) it does not require any supervision in the form of explicit tutoring, ii) it learns pairings between form and meaning and iii) it induces complex syntactic constructions (and their arguments) together with a mapping to a semantic representation beyond mere word-concept associations. A comparison to approaches from the area of learning grammars for semantic parsing shows that the results of our approach are indeed competitive.