Project description

An Ontology for based on Stanford Linguist Beth Levin inventory of verbs.

Levin verb ontology (LVO) contains explicit syntactic and semantic information for classes of verbs as defined by Beth Levin. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb’s meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. Levin’s verb classes are based on the ability of a verb to occur or not occur in pairs of syntactic frames that are in some sense meaning preserving (diathesis alternation). Levin’s verb inventory covers 3,024 verbs. Although only 784 verbs are polysemous verbs, the total frequency of polysemous verbs in the British National Corpus (BNC) is comparable to the total frequency of monospermous verbs (48.4%:51.6%). The focus is on verbs for which distribution of syntactic frames is a useful indicator of class membership, and, correspondingly, on classes which are relevant for such verbs. By using Levin’s classification, we obtain a window on some (but not all) of the potentially useful semantic propert

Tools and Technologies

• RDF
• RDFs
• OWL
• SWRL Rules
• Protégé

Project tag

• Ontology
• Semantic Web
• NLP