The Organization of Verbs and Verb Concepts in a Semantic Net

The focus of this paper will be the representation of verbs forms and verb concpets in WordNet, a semantic network of English (Miller, 1990; Fellbaum, in press). A brief comparison between WordNet and decompositional models of the lexicon as well as Pustejovsky’s (1991, 1995) Generative Lexicon is followed by an examination of synonym sets, the units of the network. We consider the semantic and syntactic constraints that operate on non-literal extensions of verb senses. The paper shows how the particular semantic classification of verbs in WordNet reflects the regular syntactic behavior of verbs in terms of transitivity alternations. 1

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