An Ontological Framework for Lexical Resources

for Verbs
April 2, 2014
1 Introduction
Our purpose in this paper is to look at the case of the representation of verbs,
or more specically verbs that represent states or events. Distinguish between
is a and hyponymy.
2 Lexicons and Ontologies
Assume the existence of a lexicon L in a language L that consists of a set of
lexical items (words or phrases) {l
1
, ..., l
k
} in the language L. We can provide
dierent kinds of morphosyntactic information by mapping the lexical entries in
L to phonetic representations, category information, subcategorisation frames,
etc. We will also assume that there exists an ontology O with vocabulary items
consisting of relation symbols and constants. We use the ontology to provide the
semantics for the lexicon by associating concepts in O with the lexical entries
in L.
We call the pairing (l, o) of a lexical entry l with a vocabulary item o belong-
ing to V with respect to the ontology O an ontological word sense, or simply
sense for short. We can represent this word sense coupling with a reied sense
object s S, where S L V , this is the approach taken by lemon, give ref
and explain.
The sense s = (l, o) should be understood as referring to the word l when
taken to mean o. We assume that the ontology here is language independent
in that the dierent relations between items in the ontology arent based solely
on how the corresponding words are used in language, but instead that the
ontology is based on additional information derived from world knowledge.
For example, given the lexical item dog we can pair it with the vocabulary
item dog where dog represents the extension of dog, this can be represented as
a sense (dog, dog).
The same lexical entry can of course have dierent meanings, so that we
cannot simply dene a function from lexical entries to ontological elements in
order to reprsent meaning, instead we need a relation between lexical entries and
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ontological elements. For example the word bank has at least two distinct senses:
in one of these it refers to a building where people go to deposit money, and in
another it refers to the (sloping) shore of a river. The lexical item bank can be
paired with both the concepts bank as building and bank as sloping ground,
say, where our ontology restricts the meaning of these concepts based on a
semantic network of relations, e.g., our ontology might contain the following
formulae:
x.(bank as building(x) building(x))
x.(bank as sloping ground(x) r.(borders(x, r) river(r)))
If we restrict ourselves to lexical items (like a great number of noun phrases)
whose meaning can be represented by concepts (by which we mean unary pred-
icates or one place relations), then we can give a very straightforward denition
of what it means for two lexical entries l
1
, l
2
to be hyponyms (with respect to
our ontology O): we dene the binary relation hyp between senses so that hyp
holds between two senses s
1
= (l
1
, C
1
) and s
2
= (l
2
, C
2
) where C
1
, C
2
are unary,
if we can show that the formula below follows from our ontology:
x.(C
1
(x) C
2
(x)).
Similarly we can dene a relation syn representing synonymy as above but with
the following formula
x.(C
1
(x) C
2
(x)).
We can generalise this to lexical entries that have a meaning that we would
wish to represent using n-ary for n 2, relations for example with nouns such
asmother or friendship.
This denition is of course over-simplistic and fails to capture a number
of important dicult cases. Indeed there will be many situations in which
two senses for two dierent lexical entries are synonymous according to our
denition (based on our ontology) but which arent quite synonymous in actual
language use. Perhaps these two senses are only regarded as near synonyms
(as is frequently noted its extremely dicult to nd true synonyms in natural
language) or it could be that there isnt a ne enough distinction made in the
ontology (perhaps the distinction which is made in actual language use is one
which we wouldnt want to make in a well designed, ecient ontology anyway).
It may be a matter of register (think of all the slang words referring to the
male and female genitalia, which apparently dier only in terms of the contexts
in which it is proper to use them), or more generally of connotation versus
denotation.
The denition of hyponymy in lexical semantics is usually given in terms of
sentence frames and textual entailment, that is on the basis of how the word is
actually used. Cruse gives the following denition of hyponymy.
A sense
1
s = (l, c) is a hyponym of the lexical item s

= (l

, c

) if the sentence
1
Cruse uses the term lexical unit to denote the form meaning complex which we refer to
as sense.
2
A is f(l) unilaterally entails (i.e., entails but is not entailed in turn by) A is
f(l); where l is to be understood as c and l

as c

.
Here as in Cruse f(X) is an indenite expression, and represents the mini-
mum syntactic elaboration of a lexical item X for it to function as a complement
of the verb to be.
By this denition student is a hyponym of person, red apple is a hyponym
of apple, and apple is a hyponym of food.
However, adhering to certain ontology design principles such as OntoClean
that put a strong emphasis on metaphysical or cognitive soundness in conceptual
modelling, could result in an ontology in which for example, the lexical entry
student is represented as a role and therefore cannot properly be regarded as
referring to the same kind of thing as the word person does, so there should
be no subsumption relation between the concepts student and person, nor,
to take another example, between the concepts group and organisation.
Thus our denitions of hyponymy as the relation hyp, as well of syn require
a great deal of tweaking and it is clear that we should specify a number of ex-
ceptions to the statements expressed in the formulae given above; even if this is
heavily dependent on what is actually in our ontology some general principles
may be formulated. It seems that in most cases the formula we gave above for
hyp above, is a sucient but not necessary condition for when two lexical items
are hyponyms in Cruses denition. It is also likely that many of these excep-
tions can be systematically dened for example certain classes of roles including
for students or professionals can be related via a natural language hyponymy
relation to the class of persons. We can dene these as special relations that
are in a sense imposed upon the ontology and are specically language related
but which are systematically based on ontological categories.
Cruse denes the relation of taxonymy (a subrelation of hyponymy) as hold-
ing between two senses s = (l, c), s

= (l

, c

), when the following diagnostic

frame holds: An l is a kind/type of l

. This is a much stricter relation, and

is arguably closer to the kinds of subsumption relations proposed by those who
work on formal ontologies independent of linguistic usage
2
.
A more serious issue relates to the discreteness of the ontology we have
dened and fact that its not always easy to distinguish between senses or to
determine where one sense ends and another begins: this leads to issues con-
cerning the phenomena of polysemy in a language as distinct from hononymy.
For practical intents and purposes however this issue may not prove as prob-
lematic as it seems at rst sight: a discrete ontology might very well prove to
be extremely useful even if it doesnt capture the inherent fuzziness of word
meaning.
In addition to the above denitions we can also dene ontological axioms to
represent the part Of relation that underlies meronymy. These axioms should
capture intuitive notions of what it means for one physical object to be part
of another physical object, or for each member of a class of objects to include
a member of another class of objects as a physical part, as represented by the
2
It also corresponds to the AKO meaning for the is a relation, see Brachman.
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predicate partOf. Then we could dene the relation of meronymy as holding
between two lexical entries l
1
, l
2
if there exist two senses s
1
= (l
1
, C
1
) and
s
2
= (l
2
, C
2
) and we can prove with our ontology that the following holds:
x.(C
1
(x)) y.(C
2
(y) partOf(x, y)).
Mention Granularity, Ontologies and PartOf.
There are a number of issues to be dealt with here appropos the distinction
which can be made between how the notion of parthood is treated in natural
language. For example our denition might be too strict, since it is not the
case that every arm has a hand, but we might still want to say that an arm
usually has a hand as a part. In this instance we might try a dierent tack and
base the relation of metronomy on prototypical instances of classes rather than
on a more strict, more classical notion of parthood. We will explore these issues
further in the paper.
If we start from the premises that it is useful and desirable to have a division
of labour between a lexicon as a respository of morpho-syntactical information
and an ontology as a repository of semantically relevant information, and that
the design of the ontology should be to some degree independent of the lexicon
rather than just representing linguistic usage, then we should be willing to tackle
these kinds of diculties.
Up till now we have assumed that the domain of our ontology consists solely
of endurants but in this paper we want to explore the idea that verb phrases
representing actions, processes or states can also be represented by perdurants
or four dimensional spatiotemporal entities, and that this can help us clarify
how to structure verbal taxonomies.
We do this by specifying constraints upon the ontological aspect of each
lexical resource using a model based on Smith et al.s notion of SNAP and
SPAN ontologies. That is we assume that we have two dierent ontologies N
and E with dierent domains where the domain N of N is a class of endurants
and the domain E of E is a class of perdurants so that N and E are disjoint.
Given a verb v we will dene a sense of v where it means an action or a
state as a pairing between v and a vocabulary item in E. For example, the
verbs kick or kiss both have senses which refer to a classes of action events, say,
these correspond to the concepts kicking event and kissing event, respectively
in our ontology E. So we are interested in models which have sets interpret-
ing predicates representing kicking events and kissing events respectively, and
containing four dimensional perdurant entities with which we can associate a
property of duration as well as spatial properties relating to location. As in
cite Smith et al, we can dene inter ontological relations between the endurant
entities of N and the perdurant entities of E in order to model the relations
between events and their participants. This will be especially useful when it
comes to discussing FrameNet.
We can understand the hyponymy relation between verbs in similar terms to
the hyponymy relation between nouns. A verb v
1
is a hyponym of another verb
v
2
as before there exists a sense s
1
= (v
1
, A
1
) of v
1
and a sense s
2
= (v
2
, A
2
)
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such that we can prove that in our intended models an events membership in
A
1
implies its membership in A
2
. So to take a simple case, if we look at the
class of strolling events, can we say of each such strolling event that it is also
a walking event? It seems to be quite obviously the case. We can check this
against Cruses sentence frame denition of hyponymy. So that it is true that
A is ambling unilaterally entails A is walking, similarly A is strolling
unilaterally entails A is walking. On the other hand this also means that
to snore and to dream is a hyponym of to sleep so that as with nouns this
traditional notion of hyponymy seems to be too broad, similarly to take up an
old Cartesian argument to think is a hyponym of to be: it is unlikely that in a
well designed ontology we will want to link the set of snoring events with the
set of sleeping events using a simple i sa relation, or even to link thinking to
being events in such a direct way. Similarly in our ontology based approach it
is clear that each instance of a snoring event also qualies as a sleeping event.
What is clear is that we need a relation parallelling that of taxonomy between
nouns that reects a less general relation between verbs.
In fact the developers of WordNet dened a special manner relation for verbs,
so called troponymy. Two verb senses s
1
, s
2
for the verbs V
1
, V
2
are troponyms
if the sentence frame To V
1
is to V
2
in a certain manner can be used. This
troponymy relation is a subrelation of hyponmym and with sounder ontological
basis than hyponymy. Since To snore is to sleep in a certain manner sounds
odd, indeed we might want to say that snoring is an activity that takes place
during sleep, or each snoring event is a sub event or a part of a sleeping event,
therefore to snore is not a troponym of to sleep. On the other hand To amble
is to walk in a certain manner, To stroll is to walk in a certain manner.
Fellbaum suggests that this troponym relation can be further specied by
introduced dierent sub-relations of the troponymy relation that elaborate the
kinds of manner relation that hold between verbs. This would help to re-
introduce aspects of componential to the representation of verbal meaning.
Talk about Levins classes of verbs.
3 WordNet
The WordNet lexical resource is structured according to the notion of a synset.
The lexical relations of hyponymy and troponymy (along with the others) hold
between synsets rather than between senses. A synset is a grouping of lexical
entries sharing the same meaning so for example. So the word bank shares a
synset with the words riverbank, riverside, incline, slope, side, waterside as well
as a synset with, among other words, bankbuilding and despository.
We can represent this as a set of senses
3
{s
1
, ..., s
m
} such that each pair of
senses is related by the Syn relation dened above, i.e., Syn(s
i
, s
j
) ; in other
words we are collapsing together sets of senses that share a common meaning
component. However, the meaning of the synset isnt explicitly given in terms of
3
This isnt quite accurate though since the set of senses can be ordered in some versions
of WN, but we will skirt over this detail in this paper.
5
relations between the senses and a separate ontological or semantic component
(although the gloss does obviously does provide an explicit meaning for a synset).
WN can be viewed as an ontology, with the synsets representing concepts in
the ontology and the lexical relations representing ontological relations. This
is problematic, as many of the relations in WN seem to be unsound from an
ontological design point of view, and considerable work has been carried out to
re-engineer WN as an ontology, give refs.
We would argue that WN is to a great extent a representation of linguistic
usage and that to restructure it on the basis of more objective or cognitively
based principles, although it is extremely useful, is to take it away from this
original purpose. It might give us unexpected results in NLP tasks: we might
not be able to derive relations between word uses that are commonly embodied
in language use but that fall short of more logical, ontologically sound principles.
(Pragmatic view that Felbaum mentions)
4 IMAGACT
In the IMAGACT ontology the focus is restricted to action verbs in their non-
metaphorical/non-idiomatic usage. According to IMAGACT terminology these
are referred to as primary usages (as opposed to marked usages).
The idea is to dene a cross-linguistic ontology of action types, that is, to
specify the dierent classes of actions that are referred to by verbs in dierent
natural languages; these types reect how languages represent events or pro-
cesses in which actions occur. We now present an outline of a formal ontology
based on the informal details already given of the IMAGACT ontology in (cite
these papers). We refer to this ontology as I. IMAGACT is a cross linguis-
tic ontology of actions so we will assume a nite number of (verbal) lexicons
L
1
, L
2
, ...L
k
, each with a dierent associated lang(L
i
); let L be a disjoint union
of the L
i
.
The ontology I contains a nite set of concepts ActionType= {A
1
, ..., A
n
}
representing language-derived action types. These action types represent, in
our model, sets of perdurants, action instances, that share some common fea-
ture with respect to the kind of action that is performed during each action
instance; this classication is determined by how these processes or events can
be described in natural language.
The captures relation holds between a verb v L and an action instance
e E, if there exists a sentence, or a native speaker is able to come up with a
sentence, s in L containing an instance of the verb v where the verb refers to
the process e or at least we should be able to say that native speakers of the
language L would generally agree that the verb v can be used to describe e.
What follows is a brief description of how these action types were derived
during the IMAGACT project (but see ref for more details).
For any one of the languages covered by the project, annotators who were
native speakers of that language, were given sentences containing each of the
verbs to be processed as a main verb from a corpus in the form of a list of
6
concordances. They were rst asked to rewrite the sentences in third person,
active present tense form and lter out the primary instances of the verb, before
classifying the instances in terms of whether they referred to the same type of
action, where the notion of action type was initially founded on the annotators
native language intuition.
This meant that each action type A was eectively witnessed by a set of
sentences s describing particular events f
A
with the main verb v
s
where cap-
tures(v
s
, f
A
) and A(f
A
). We can regard these processes f
A
as constants belong-
ing to our ontology.
In order to make it easier to reason and work with these action types in
IMAGACT most (if not every) action types were given a protoypical scene rep-
resenting a process or event that captures certain properties regarded as being
most typical or most representative of that action. A scene can be represented
by a video clip, which can be interpreted as either being the video of an event or
as a faithful interpretation of the event. Other scenes were mapped to an action
type with the instance relation; this meant that although the scene was not re-
garded as being as prototypical it still represented an action instance belonging
to the action type.
In terms of our ontological model each scene for an action type A is a repre-
sentation of an action instance s
A
. That the action instance p
A
is prototypical of
A means that p
A
has been chosen as a prototypical member of A and is mapped
to A with the prototype relation. Since each scene object was prototypical for at
least one action type we can use prototypical scenes and the prototype, instance
relations to help to dene relations between action types.
Talk about previous work in ontologies with prototypes.
We can dene a relation hasActionType between a verb in L and an action
type A if for each action instance a A is is the case that captures(v, a). A
verb can be linked to more than one action type (it can also be linked to none).
We can then derive indirect relations between verbs in dierent languages
via their hasActionType relations. A verb like take in English or its translation
prendere in Italian will obviously capture a large number of action types in
comparison with a verb like lick or kiss (in their primary usages). Verbs like
take that encompass or capture a large number of action types are referred to
as general verbs in the IMAGACT terminology.
One of the aims of IMAGACT was to make a systematic study, using corpus
evidence of how verbs in dierent languages can capture dierent action types,
in particular of verbs that are considered as translations or as close translations
of one another. For example take in English and prendere in Italian, both share
a number of action dierent action types but take captures some action types
that arent part of the meaning of prendere and vice versa.
The IMAGACT ontology does not make sense distinctions explicitly as in
WordNet. One could see each pairing of a verb with an action type as a sense.
This may lead to too ne a distinction made between dierent senses of a verb
however; for example, not all of dierent action types captured by take found on
the IMAGACT website seem to correspond to dierent meanings of the verb.
We could of course try to map the senses of WN to the IMAGACT action types
7
in order to group together dierent action types.
The action types themselves were not explicitly hierarchically arranged as
part of the IMAGACT project but are they are grouped together on the ba-
sis of certain basic categories such as Movement, Change of location, Facial
expressions.
5 FrameNet
8