Syntactic-Semantic Classes of Context-Sensitive Synonyms Based on a Bilingual Corpus

This paper summarizes first findings of a three-year study (an ongoing research project) on verb synonymy based on both syntactic and semantic criteria. Primary language resources used for the study are existing lexical and corpus resources, namely the Prague Dependency Treebank-style valency lexicons, FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank and Czech and English WordNets and the parallel Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank, which contains deep syntactic and partially semantic annotation of running texts. The resulting lexicon, called CzEngClass, and all associated resources linked to the existing lexicons and corpora resulting from this project will be made publicly and freely available. While the project proper assumes manual annotation work, we expect to use the resulting resource (together with the existing ones) as a necessary resources for developing automatic methods for extending such a lexicon, or creating similar lexicons for other languages.