Abstract
Aiming at acquiring semantic relations between events from a large corpus, this paper proposes several extensions to a state-of-the-art method originally designed for entity relation extraction. First, expressions of events are defined to specify the class of the acquisition task. Second, the templates of co-occurrence patterns are extended so that they can capture semantic relations between event mentions. Experiments on a Japanese Web corpus show that (a) there are indeed specific co-occurrence patterns useful for event relation acquisition, and (b) For action-effect relation, at least five thousand relation instances are acquired from a 500M-sentence Web corpus with a precision of about 66%.
