A ‘Dipdive’ into Motion: Exploring Lexical Resources towards a Comprehensive Semantic and Syntactic Description (2024)

Abstract: In this paper I illustrate the semantic description of verbs provided in three semantic resources (FrameNet, VerbNet and VerbAtlas) in comparative terms with a view to identifying common and distinct components in their representation and obtaining a preliminary idea of the resources’ interoperability. To this end, I provide a comparison of a small sample of motion verbs aligned with semantic frames and classes in the three resources. I also describe the semantic annotation of Bulgarian motion verbs using the framework defined in the Berkeley FrameNet project and its enrichment with information from the other two resources, which has been enabled by the mapping between: (i) their major semantic units – FrameNet frames, VerbNet classes and VerbAtlas frames, and (ii) their ’building blocks’ – frame elements (FrameNet )and semantic roles (VerbNet, VerbAtlas).

## introduction in this paper i embark on a comparison of the semantic description of verbs (using wordnet as a lexical inventory) provided in three semantic resources, framenet, verbnet and verbatlas, to the end of identifying common and distinct components in their representation and obtaining a preliminary idea of the resources' interoperability. the study is based on a small sample of motion verbs aligned with semantic frames and classes in the three resources. the analysis is applicable both to theoretical studies of the semantic components of meaning and to the practical task of validating the automatic assignment of semantic information from the resources employed to wordnet synsets. in the second part of the paper i describe the semantic annotation of bulgarian motion verbs using the framework defined in the berkeley framenet project and its enrichment with information from the other two resources, which has been enabled by the mapping between: (i) their major semantic units -framenet frames, verbnet classes and verbatlas frames, and (ii) their 'building blocks' -frame elements (framenet) and semantic roles (verbnet, verbatlas). the two tasks have been implemented simultaneously, focusing on motion verbs. part of the work has also been employed in the development of a framenet-like semantic resource for bulgarian. ## language resources several large-coverage lexical-semantic and syntactic resources as well as a couple of annotated corpora have been employed in this study. in this section i briefly present them and comment on how they are integrated with each other. ## inter-resource mapping this work employs a wordnet-to-framenet mapping described in @xcite which makes use of and builds upon several previously implemented ones, in particular: the direct mappings provided within framenet @xcite , extendedwordframenet (laparra and rigau, 2010) and mapnet @xcite , supplemented with additional indirect mapping through verbnet @xcite . the combination of these previous mappings resulted in 4,306 unique synsetto-frame alignments, amounting to 30.5% of all the verb synsets @xcite . different methods for expanding the coverage between the two resources have been proposed. two of the well-known approaches involve discovering a possibly suitable frame for a verb in wordnet not featured in framenet based on its semantic relation(s) to verbs having a correspondence in framenet @xcite or applying graph-based algorithms to identify relevant senses of verbs evoking certain semantic frames (de @xcite . the procedure used in this paper is based on the exploration of the structural properties of word-net and framenet @xcite . verbs in a wordnet synset generally exhibit the same or very similar meaning, which implies that they are associated with the same semantic frame. moreover, both resources are hierarchically organised based on the notion of inheritance from a more general to a more specific synset or frame. the alignment between the resources reflects the notion of inheritance -a more specific concept should be associated with the frame of its hypernym or with a more specific frame elaborating on (and possibly inheriting from) or otherwise related to the mother frame, although this is not borne out consistently in practice. the method involves: (1) manual assignment of frames to root verb synsets to ensure accurate mapping at the top hierarchical level (and thus alleviate error propagation); (2) automatic assignment of the hypernym's frame onto hyponyms which were not previously mapped; and (3) implementation of a set of enhancing procedures involving post-editing @xcite . as a result, the coverage has been increased to 13,104 synset-to-frame alignments (94% of the verb synsets), of which more than 6,000 have been validated manually. finally, verbatlas is aligned with wordnet by design, as its verb frames have been defined specifically to provide appropriate semantic description in terms of predicate-argument structures and ensure complete coverage of the wordnet synsets. ## a corpus of annotated examples the corpus of annotated bulgarian examples (section 3.1) consists of sentences illustrating the use of a number of representative verbs from 5 highly frequent motion frames: motion, self motion, traversing, arriving and departing. framenet provides a number of valence patterns for each lexical unit evoking a frame. valence patterns represent co-occurring combinations of frame elements attested in the framenet corpus, i.e. the actual realisations of a lexical unit in context. following the berkeley framenet approach, each example in the bulgarian corpus is supplied with annotation that marks both the frame elements realised in a sentence and their syntactic category and function. in such a way, information is obtained about: (i) the combinatorial properties of the annotated lexical unit, i.e. the particular combinations of both core and non-core frame elements that actually occur in the examples; (ii) the syntaxsemantic interface, i.e. the regularities in the syntactic projection of the frame elements into syntactic positions; (iii) the syntactic groups realising the frame elements (along with their morpho-syntactic properties) and the prepositions, complementisers and other lexical items that introduce them. ## conclusion the work described in this paper represents a cursory dip-dive into verb semantics, aiming to delineate the specifics of: (i) a cross-lingual 'deep dive' study implemented through the adaptation of semantic resources developed for english to bulgarian; (ii) a cross-resource analysis implemented through the exploration of the conceptualisation of verb semantics in resources constructed according to different theoretical frameworks. this undertaking has been enabled through two types of alignment: (i) a mapping between verbs (in wordnet) and their semantic descriptions represented as framenet semantic frames, verbatlas predicate-argument structure frames and verbnet verb classes and predicate-argument structures; (ii) an alignment between equivalent facets of the semantic description, e.g. between corresponding frame elements and semantic roles or between a semantic frame and a predicate-argument structure. the end goal is the devising of a synergistic approach to the semantic description of verbs and the harnessing of the wealth of linguistic information to semantic annotation, semantic role labelling and similar tasks.