Selectional Preferences II
Resnik (1993, 1996)’s idea for Selectional Preferences uses the notions of selectional preference strength and selectional association. We look at the <Verb, Direct Object> Problem.
Selectional Preference strength, S(v) measures how strongly the verb constrains its direct object.
S(v) is defined as the KL divergence between the prior distribution of direct objects (for verbs in general) and the distribution of direct objects of the verb we are trying to characterize.
We make 2 assumptions in this model: 1) only the head noun of the object is considered; 2) rather than dealing with individual nouns, we look at classes of nouns.