Building a class-based verb lexicon using TAGs
Karin Kipper, Hoa Trang Dang, William Schuler, Martha Stone Palmer · 2000
We present a class-based approach to building a verb lexicon that makes explicit the close relation between syntax and semantics for Levin classes. We have used a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar to capture the syntax associated with each verb class and have added semantic predicates to each tree, which allow for a compositional interpretation. 1. Introduction We describe a computational verb lexicon called VerbNet which utilizes Levin verb classes (Levin, 1993) to systematically construct lexical entries. We have used Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) (Joshi, 1985; Schabes, 1990) to capture the syntax associated with each verb class, and have added semantic predicates. We also show how regular extensions of verb meaning can be achieved through the adjunction of particular syntactic phrases. We base these regular extensions on intersective Levin classes, a fine-grained variation on Levin classes, as a source of semantic components associated with specific adjuncts (Dang et ...