Learning Frames from Text with an Unsupervised Latent Variable Model

We develop a probabilistic latent-variable model to discover semantic frames—types of events and their participants—from corpora. We present a Dirichlet-multinomial model in which frames are latent categories that explain the linking of verb-subject-object triples, given document-level sparsity. We analyze what the model learns, and compare it to FrameNet, noting it learns some novel and interesting frames. This document also contains a discussion of inference issues, including concentration parameter learning; and a small-scale error analysis of syntactic parsing accuracy.