Linking the S anskrit W ord N et to the V edic Dependency Treebank: a pilot study (2023)

Abstract: The Sanskrit WordNet is a resource currently under development, whose core was induced from a Vedic text sample semantically annotated by means of an ontology mapped on the Princeton WordNet synsets. Building on a previous case study on Ancient Greek (Zanchi et al. 2021), we show how sentence frames can be extracted from morphosyntactically parsed corpora by linking an existing dependency treebank of Vedic Sanskrit to verbal synsets in the Sanskrit WordNet. Our case study focuses on two verbs of asking, yāc- and prach-, featuring a high degree of variability in sentence frames. Treebanks enhanced with WordNet-based semantic information revealed to be of crucial help in motivating sentence frame alternations.

## introduction wordnets (wns) are lexical databases storing meaning in a relational way; they usually include little or no morphosyntactic information (sentence frames, sfs) for verb senses @xcite . instead, morphosyntactically annotated corpora (treebanks) store parsed sentences in the form of trees and allow automatically extracting all sfs available for each verb. building on previous work on ancient @xcite , we present a pilot study in which the sanskrit wordnet (swn) is linked to the vedic treebank (vtb). by discussing the sfs of two sanskrit ditransitive verbs of asking, yāc-'beg for' and prach-'ask, ask for, seek', we show how treebanks enhanced with wn-based semantic information @xcite , wns enhanced with treebank-based syntactic information) can motivate sf alternations. other 2 the sanskrit wordnet in the family of ## sentence frames in wordnets the verb request in the princeton wn (pwn) is associated to three synsets, including v#00510998 "express the need or desire for". in this sense, request features two sfs: ## a case study with two verbs of asking: yāc-and prach- we now discuss the sfs we extracted for the verbs yācand prach-. note that vedic is a null subject language, but we still indicate subject nps as nn (nominative np), as it triggers verbal agreement (there are no impersonal forms among the occurrences analyzed). the verb shows a complex aspectual system, with the present stem indicating imperfective, the aorist stem perfective and the perfect resultative aspect. it is not clear to what extent this system, that vedic inherited for proto-indo-european and that is reflected in verbal morphology, was still relevant at the time of the vedic texts; the vtb allows retrieving only partial information about verbal aspect, as the aorist and the perfect are not kept distinct. the sfs we found in our corpus are discussed in sections 5.1-5.2 and summarized in ## future work we plan to add semantic information to all verbs in the vtb and to extract sfs attested for each verb as well as information on their frequency. while in some cases it will be necessary to manually add synsets to each occurrence of a verb, the process can be partly automated when the relationship between the sf and a verb's sense is stable. cf. the different synsets associated to active and middle forms of the verb duh-: a. active 'milk', 'extract', 'benefit from': -intransitive/transitive + cognate object: v#00133336 "take milk from female mammals" -transitive: v#00925055 "obtain from a substance, as by mechanical action" -metaphoric: v#01565865 "benefit from" b. middle 'give milk': -intransitive/transitive + cognate object: v#00806715 "give suck to" -transitive: v#01119839 "give or supply" as alternations in a verb's sfs often co-occur with voice alternations, automatic annotation will be possible once the vtb has been enriched with information on verbal voice. we also plan to enhance the annotation interface of the swn to include syntactic information. since the swn is enriched with chronological information on the attestation of every single sense of a word, enhancing the annotation interface in such a way will allow studying changes in valency over time.