Ontological Classification of Verbs based on Overlapping Verb Senses

Abstract

Natural language can be easily understood by everyone irrespective of their differences in age or region or qualification. Based on various theories proposed in psycho-linguistics, Roger Schank came up with the proposition that the basis of natural language is conceptual and the conceptual base is inter-lingual . According to Indian grammatical tradition, all content words in a language are either verbal roots or derived from verbal roots . Inspired by these two ideas we are proposing a new set of meaning primitives based on overlapping senses of verbs. Using these meaning primitives we are trying to develop a new ontological classification of verbs. newline newlineWe propose that meaning of a verb is composed of seven fundamental senses implicating different attribute sets. In this proposal maximally overlapping sense of verbs is taken as happening (Sanskrit bhAva), as in the Indian linguistic traditions. We have rendered it as a recursive form with a structure change of state in context . Each fundamental sense is a kind of happening giving different contiguity of states with different attribute set as context. We derive the meaning of verbs from a universal verb happening such that every verb is uniquely specified across languages. The method has been applied to develop ontologically informed etymon in English and Indian language, Sanskrit. The primitives along with ontological attributes have been used to explicate the meaning of verbs. This form of meaning specification of verbs is used to develop language independent ontological classification of verbs which in turn can be used in Natural Language Processing applications like semantic search and machine translation.