Building a Resource of Ontological and Formal Lexical-Semantic Knowledge

In this paper, we give details on our on-going efforts to building a lexical resource that provides fine-grained lexical-semantic analyses of French verbs, in addition to a formal organisation of the ontological con-cepts that are used to describe them. For implementing this information, we make use of technology developed in the context of the Semantic Web, such as the Web On-tology Language OWL, Description Logic reasoners, and the Semantic Web Rule Language SWRL. We motivate our efforts by comparing our verb analyses to those found in the French EuroWordNet (Vossen, 1998). We fur-ther show the necessity of detailed lexical-semantic knowledge – including informa-tion about presuppositions and inferences – as well as of ontological type informa-tion e.g. on permitted fillers for argument slots, for the successful completion of computational linguistic tasks. Since our resource is primarily intended for compu-tational use, we will outline possible ap-plications of the modelled information.