Grounding Lexical Sets of Causative-Inchoative Verbs with Word Embedding

Lexical sets contain the words filling the argument positions of a verb in one of its senses. They can be extracted from corpora automatically. The purpose of this paper is demonstrating that their vector representation based on word embedding provides insights onto many linguistic phenomena, such as causative-inchoative verbs. A first experiment aims at investigating the internal structure of the sets, which are known to be radial and continuous categories cognitively. A second experiment shows that the distance between the intransitive subject set and transitive object set is correlated with the spontaneity of the event expressed by the verb, defined according to morphological coding and frequency.