[Corpora-List] agent and patient probabilities

[Adam Kilgarriff]

Jim,

Take a look at the Sketch Engine (http://www.sketchengine.co.uk -
self-registration for free trial).  It finds the triples you are looking for
in a fully corpus-based way.

Resources like the Penn Treebank are way too small.  BNC (100 million words)
supports pretty good list of high-salience triples, as you'll see on the
site.

Adam Kilgarriff


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
Behalf Of Jim Magnuson
Sent: 23 January 2007 04:31
To: corpora at lists.uib.no
Subject: [Corpora-List] agent and patient probabilities

I'm a psycholinguist rather than a computational linguist, with a  
"newbie" question.

For some experiments, we need agent-verb-patient triples where the  
"goodness" of the agents and patients to the verb vary in strength.  
Typical ways to develop materials for such studies is by having human  
subjects rate how "good" various items are as agents and patients for  
particular verbs (e.g., "how likely is a dog to walk?", "how likely  
is a dog to be walked?"). While this works well, it's of course very  
labor (and subject) intensive. So I'm hoping to automate this.

I'm looking for recommendations for parsed corpora and tools to use  
(with the goal of getting this going ASAP).

I know about the Penn Treebank; are there better and/or less  
expensive options for US English, or is this just the way to go?

I'm an okay perl programmer, and computer savvy; are there tools that  
would be helpful?

Thanks  very much,

jim