---
title: "Class-Based Probability Estimation Using a Semantic Hierarchy"
description: "Clark and Weir address data sparsity in estimating how likely a given noun sense is to fill a specific… 29 references, cited by 62 papers here."
authors: ["Stephen Clark", "David Weir"]
year: 2002
venue: "Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/J02-2003/"
doi: "10.1162/089120102760173643"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/clark-2002-class-based-probability-estimation-semantic/"
---
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# Class-Based Probability Estimation Using a Semantic Hierarchy

**Authors:** [Stephen Clark](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/stephen-clark/) and [David Weir](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-weir/) · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** [Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/) ([Computational Linguistics 2002](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/2002/)) · **Publisher:** [The MIT Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/the-mit-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J02-2003/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J02-2003.pdf) · [DOI 10.1162/089120102760173643](https://doi.org/10.1162/089120102760173643) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2003698958)

**Citations:** 120 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [62](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/clark-2002-class-based-probability-estimation-semantic/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Clark and Weir address data sparsity in estimating how likely a given noun sense is to fill a specific argument slot of a predicate, for example the subject of *run*. Such estimates support PP-attachment and other structural disambiguation, parsing, WSD, anaphora resolution and language modeling. The authors use the noun hierarchy of WordNet 1.6. Bayes' theorem rewrites the target quantity so that the verb is conditioned on a class of senses (a hypernym together with everything below it), not on a single sense. A sense is then generalized upward through its hypernyms until a chi-square test signals that the verb's conditional probability differs significantly across the children of the current node. On a pseudo-disambiguation task, this approach beats two rival class-based estimators: Li and Abe's MDL-based generalization and Resnik's selectional-preference measure. Error analysis suggests both rivals generalize too aggressively. The work targets practical probability estimation for NLP systems rather than recovering linguistically ideal selectional restrictions.

## Key points
- The resource is the WordNet 1.6 noun hierarchy. It has roughly 66,000 concepts in nine subhierarchies, joined here under an added common root. It is a DAG, but only about 1% of nodes have multiple parents, so it is treated as nearly a tree.
- The approximation uses a class-conditioned estimate, for example p(run | ⟨animal⟩, subj), in place of p(run | ⟨dog⟩, subj). This is combined with relative-frequency estimates of p(c | r) and p(v | r). All estimates are unsmoothed.
- Two variants of the chi-square test are compared for the generalization step: the standard Pearson statistic and the log-likelihood statistic.
- The baselines are Li and Abe's MDL approach (MDL software provided by Diana McCarthy) and Resnik's measure. The proposed method outperforms both on pseudo-disambiguation.
- The article extends the authors' NAACL 2001 paper. Training data on predicate arguments is assumed to come from a treebank or shallow parser.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Edinburgh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-edinburgh/) — University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom · 381 works · 80,747 citations
- [University of Sussex](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-sussex/) — University, Brighton, United Kingdom · 24 works · 3,604 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Stephen Clark and David Weir. 2002. Class-Based Probability Estimation Using a Semantic Hierarchy. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{clark2002class,
  title = {{Class-Based Probability Estimation Using a Semantic Hierarchy}},
  author = {Stephen Clark and David Weir},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.1162/089120102760173643},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/089120102760173643}
}
```

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## References

29 references, 7 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 2 November 2026*