Abstract
In this paper we investigate the properties of Japanese and English transitiveintransitive alternations.For Japanese alternations, we show that the selectional restrictions of alternating arguments are more similar than those for non-alternating arguments.Across languages we show that there are four major strategies for translating alternating verbs.Finally, we present a method that uses alternation data to add new entries to an existing bilingual valency lexicon.If the existing lexicon has only one half of the alternation, then our method constructs the other half.The new entries have detailed information about argument structure and selectional restrictions. In this paper we focus on one class of alternations, but our method is applicable to any alternation.We were able to increase the coverage of the causative alternation to 85.4%, and the new entries gave an overall improvement in translation quality of 32%.
