Using WordNet to Posit Hierarchical Structure in Levin's Verb Classes

In this paper we report on experiments using WordNet synset tags to evaluate the seman-tic properties of the verb classes cataloged by Levin 1993. This paper represents ongoing
research begun at the University of Pennsylvania (Rosenzweig et al. 1997, Palmer et
al. 1997) and the University of Maryland (Dorr and Jones 1996b, 1996d, 1996e). Using
WordNet sense tags to constrain the intersection of Levin classes, we avoid spurious class
intersections introduced by homonymy and polysemy (run a bath, run a mile). By adding
class intersections based on a single shared sense-tagged word, we minimize the impact
of the non-exhaustiveness of Levin's database (Dorr and Olsen 1996, Dorr to appear).
By examining the syntactic properties of the intersective classes, we provide a clearer
picture of the relationship between WordNet/EuroWordNet and the LCS interlingua for
machine translation and other NLP applications.