Making Virtue of Necessity: A Verb Lexicon

We describe the verb lexicon of OpenWordNet-PT, a wordnet-like resource for (mostly Brazilian) Portuguese and a series of experiments that we designed to extend its coverage. These experiments include checking online lists of most common verbs, checking corpora freely available such as the Bosque-UD (the Bosque corpus annotated with Universal Dependencies) and especially checking a dictionary of Brazilian politicians’ biographies (the DHBB) that we consider an ideal corpus for the kind of information extraction we are after. We certainly succeeded into extending the coverage of the verb lexicon, however it remains to be seen whether this new coverage is enough for the original application.