Identifying Semantic Relations and Functional Properties of Human Verb Associations

Sabine Schulte im Walde, Alissa Melinger

Abstract: This paper uses human verb associations as the basis for an investigation of verb properties, focusing on semantic verb relations and prominent nominal features. First, the lexical semantic taxonymy GermaNet is checked on the types of classic semantic relations in our data; verb-verb pairs not covered by GermaNet can help to detect missing links in the taxonomy, and provide a useful basis for defining non-classical relations. Second, a statistical grammar is used for determining the conceptual roles of the noun responses. We present prominent syntax-semantic roles and evidence for the usefulness of co-occurrence information in distributional verb descriptions.