Extended lexical-semantic classification of English verbs

Abstract

Lexical-semantic verb classifications have proved useful in supporting various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The largest and the most widely deployed classification in English is Levin's (1993) taxonomy of verbs and their classes. While this resource is attractive in being extensive enough for some NLP use, it is not comprehensive. In this paper, we present a substantial extension to Levin's taxonomy which incorporates 57 novel classes for verbs not covered (comprehensively) by Levin. We also introduce 106 novel diathesis alternations, created as a side product of constructing the new classes. We demonstrate the utility of our novel classes by using them to support automatic subcategorization acquisition and show that the resulting extended classification has extensive coverage over the English verb lexicon.