Extending VerbNet’s Verb-Specific Features to Enhance Selectional Preferences of Semantic Roles

Abstract

This work proposes expanding the thematic role selectional preferences used in the lexical resource VerbNet as a way to increase the available semantic information in the resource, induce semantically-based subclasses for the more generic VerbNet classes, and create new links across classes. The addition of verb-specific features in the latest version of VerbNet provides a means for adding more specific selectional preferences based on the meaning of a class’s individual member verbs. These features could refine both the instantiated class roles and the new implicit roles introduced in VerbNet version 4. We suggest 49 classes that would benefit from 111 verb-specific selectional preferences and explain how they would enhance VerbNet’s semantic representations.

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