Textual Coverage of Eventive Entries in Lexical Semantic Resources

Eva Fucíková, Cristina Fernández Alcaina, Jan Hajic, Zdenka Uresová

Abstract: This short paper focuses on the coverage of eventive entries (verbs, predicates, etc.) of some well-known lexical semantic resources when applied to random running texts taken from the internet. While coverage gaps are often reported for manually created lexicons (which is the case of most semantically-oriented lexical ones), it was our aim to quantify these gaps, cross-lingually, on a new purely textual resource set produced by the HPLT Project from crawled internet data. Several English, German, Spanish and Czech lexical semantic resources (which, for the most part, focus on verbs and predicates) have been selected for this experiment. We also describe the challenges related to the fact that these resources are (to a varying extent) semantically oriented, meaning that the texts have to be preprocessed to obtain lemmas (base forms) and some types of MWEs before the coverage can be reasonably evaluated, and thus the results are necessarily only approximate. The coverage of these resources, with some exclusions as described in the paper, range from 41.00% to 97.33%, confirming the need to expand at least some - even well-known - resources to cover the prevailing source of today’s textual resources with regard to lexical units describing events or states (or possibly other eventive mentions).