Deep lexical semantics

Abstract

In the project we describe, we have taken a basic core of about 5000 synsets in WordNet that are the most frequently used, and we have categorized these into sixteen broad categories, including, for example, time, space, scalar notions, composite entities, and event structure. We have sketched out the structure of some of the underlying abstract core theories of commonsense knowledge, including those for the mentioned areas. These theories explicate the basic predicates in terms of which the most common word senses need to be defined or characterized. We are now encoding axioms that link the word senses to the core theories. This may be thought of as a kind of "advanced lexical decomposition", where the "primitives" into which words are "decomposed" are elements in coherently worked-out theories. In this paper we focus on our work on the 450 of these synsets that are concerned with events and their structure. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.