Interactive acquisition of thematic information of Chinese verbs for judicial verdict document understanding using templates, syntactic clues, and heuristics

The thematic knowledge can bridge the gap between semantic entities and syntactic constituents. In document understanding, the correctness and the efficiency could be improved if the thematic knowledge is available. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic method to acquire thematic knowledge of Chinese verbs by exploiting syntactic clues. The syntactic clues, which may be collected by most existing syntactic processors, reduce the hypothesis space of the theta roles. The ambiguities may be further resolved by the evidences from a trainer. A set of heuristics based on linguistic constraints are employed to guide the ambiguity resolution process. To acquire thematic information for verbs, the argument structures of the verbs must be extracted first. A template matching method is used to extract the argument structure of verbs.