Verbs Taking Clausal and Non-Finite Arguments as Signals of Modality - Revisiting the Issue of Meaning Grounded in Syntax
This work addresses the difficulty in grasping meaning components of Levin-classes for linguists and NLP researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theories and lexicons.
The study tackled the challenge of inferring semantic classes from a large syntactic classification of over 600 German verbs with clausal and non-finite arguments, by linking these classes to three lexicons (GermaNet, VerbNet, FrameNet) and providing a detailed analysis and evaluation of the resulting German-English classification.
We revisit Levin's theory about the correspondence of verb meaning and syntax and infer semantic classes from a large syntactic classification of more than 600 German verbs taking clausal and non-finite arguments. Grasping the meaning components of Levin-classes is known to be hard. We address this challenge by setting up a multi-perspective semantic characterization of the inferred classes. To this end, we link the inferred classes and their English translation to independently constructed semantic classes in three different lexicons - the German wordnet GermaNet, VerbNet and FrameNet - and perform a detailed analysis and evaluation of the resulting German-English classification (available at www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/modality-verbclasses/).