CI-P: Collaborative Research: LexLink: Aligning WordNet, FrameNet, PropBank and VerbNet

International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Computing Research Infrastructure planning grant addresses two challenges for automatic systems performing deep semantic processing: identifying the context-appropriate sense of polysemous words and interpreting the meanings and interrelations of verbs and nouns in event-denoting phrases. Preliminary steps are taken for aligning and linking four existing widely used lexical resources (WordNet, FrameNet, PropBank and VerbNet) with different but complementary contents and coverage. Methods for completing current cross-resource links and full transitive closure are explored and tested. The resulting infrastructure (LexLink) is designed to make the resources fully interoperable, capitalizing on their particular strengths with respect to word sense disambiguation and Semantic Role labeling. Four activities are carried out in the context of planning LexLink. First, a workshop is held where key representatives of the Natural Language Processing and computational semantics communities articulate needs and requirements for the planned resource and offer advice on algorithms, annotation techniques and evaluation. Second, a subsection of cross-resource links for word senses and Semantic Role labels (Agent, Instrument, etc.) resulting from the automatic transitive closure is evaluated, yielding estimates for the error rate and leading to fine-tuning of algorithms. Third, current best performing mapping algorithms for word senses and Semantic Role labels are evaluated against a human-annotated Gold Standard. Fourth, new Gold Standard data are created for additional training and testing and to refine existing algorithms. As a whole, the work provides a solid foundation for a resource with significant beneficial impact on a range of natural language applications, including machine translation, text summarization and sentiment analysis affecting areas such as health care, marketing, and education.