The Deep Lexical Semantics of Event Words

We have selected a basic core of about 5,000 synsets in WordNet that are the most frequently used, and we categorized these into 16 broad categories, including, for example, time, space, scalar notions, composite entities, and event structure. We sketched out the structure of some of the underlying abstract core theories of commonsense knowledge, including those for the mentioned areas. These theories explicate the basic predicates in terms of which the most common word senses need to be defined or characterized. We are encoding axioms that link the word senses to the core theories. This may be thought of as a kind of “advanced lexical decomposition”, where the “primitives” into which words are “decomposed” are elements in coherently worked-out theories. In this paper we focus on our work on the 450 of these synsets that are concerned with events and their structure.