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Such classes, however, require many person-years of expert effort to create manually, and methods are needed for automatically assigning verbs to appropriate classes. In this work, we develop and evaluate a feature space to support the automatic assignment of verbs into a well-known lexical semantic classification that is frequently used in natural language processing. The feature space is <jats:italic>general<\/jats:italic> \u2013 applicable to any class distinctions within the target classification; <jats:italic>broad<\/jats:italic> \u2013 tapping into a variety of semantic features of the classes; and <jats:italic>inexpensive<\/jats:italic> \u2013 requiring no more than a POS tagger and chunker. We perform experiments using support vector machines (SVMs) with the proposed feature space, demonstrating a reduction in error rate ranging from 48% to 88% over a chance baseline accuracy, across classification tasks of varying difficulty. In particular, we attain performance comparable to or better than that of feature sets manually selected for the particular tasks. Our results show that the approach is generally applicable, and reduces the need for resource-intensive linguistic analysis for each new classification task. We also perform a wide range of experiments to determine the most informative features in the feature space, finding that simple, easily extractable features suffice for good verb classification performance.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1017\/s135132490600444x","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2006,12,19]],"date-time":"2006-12-19T08:44:44Z","timestamp":1166517884000},"page":"337-367","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":24,"title":["A general feature space for automatic verb classification"],"prefix":"10.1017","volume":"14","author":[{"given":"ERIC","family":"JOANIS","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"SUZANNE","family":"STEVENSON","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"DAVID","family":"JAMES","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"56","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2008,7,1]]},"reference":[{"key":"S135132490600444X_manual_ref-7","unstructured":"Burnard, L. (ed.) (2000) British National Corpus User Reference Guide. 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