Three-Level Knowledge Representation of Predicate-Argument Mapping for Multilingual Lexicons

Building Lexicons for Machine Translation

Volume

Papers from the 1993 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In this paper, we discuss how the lexicon of our interlingua-based NLP system 1 abstracts the language-dependent portion of predicate-argument mapping information from the core meaning of verb senses (i.e. semantic concepts as defined in the knowledge base). We also show how we represent this mapping information in terms of cross-linguistically generalized mapping types called situation types and word sense-specific idiosyncrasies. This three-level representation enables us to keep the languageindependent knowledge base intact and make efficient use of lexical data by inheritance. We take advantage of large multilingual corpora to automatically acquire language- and domain-specific lexical information.