Italian VerbNet: A Construction-based Approach to Italian Verb Classification

Lucia Busso, Alessandro Lenci


Abstract
This paper proposes a new method for Italian verb classification -and a preliminary example of resulting classes- inspired by Levin (1993) and VerbNet (Kipper-Schuler, 2005), yet partially independent from these resources; we achieved such a result by integrating Levin and VerbNet’s models of classification with other theoretic frameworks and resources. The classification is rooted in the constructionist framework (Goldberg, 1995; 2006) and is distribution-based. It is also semantically characterized by a link to FrameNet’ssemanticframesto represent the event expressed by a class. However, the new Italian classes maintain the hierarchic “tree” structure and monotonic nature of VerbNet’s classes, and, where possible, the original names (e.g.: Verbs of Killing, Verbs of Putting, etc.). We therefore propose here a taxonomy compatible with VerbNet but at the same time adapted to Italian syntax and semantics. It also addresses a number of problems intrinsic to the original classifications, such as the role of argument alternations, here regarded simply as epiphenomena, consistently with the constructionist approach.
Anthology ID:
L16-1419
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2633–2642
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1419
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucia Busso and Alessandro Lenci. 2016. Italian VerbNet: A Construction-based Approach to Italian Verb Classification. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2633–2642, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Italian VerbNet: A Construction-based Approach to Italian Verb Classification (Busso & Lenci, LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1419.pdf