Representing a Resource of Formal Lexical-Semantic Descriptions in the Web Ontology Language

This paper presents an approach to disambiguating verb senses which differ wrt. the inferences they allow. It combines standard ontological tools and formalisms with in-depth formal semantic analysis and is therefore more formalised and more detailed than existing lexical semantic resources like WordNet and FrameNet. The resource presented here implements formal semantic description of verbs in the Web Ontology Language OWL and exploits its reasoning potential based on Description Logics for the disambiguation of verbs in context. After a thorough discussion of the theoretical motivation as well as the manual formal semantic analysis, we present details on the disambiguation process, which is based on a mapping from the French version of EuroWordNet to the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology. In addition to this, we focus on the selectional restrictions of verbs wrt. the ontological type of their arguments, as well as their representation as necessary and sufficient conditions in the ontology. Finally, we discuss how we make use of the Semantic Web Rule Language SWRL in order to calculate the inferences that are permitted on the selected interpretation.