A Thesaurus of Predicate-Argument Structure for Japanese Verbs to Deal with Granularity of Verb Meanings

In this paper we propose a framework of verb semantic description in order to organize different granularity of similarity between verbs. Since verb meanings highly depend on their arguments we propose a verb thesaurus on the basis of possible shared meanings with predicate-argument structure. Motivations of this work are to (1) construct a practical lexicon for dealing with alternations, paraphrases and entailment relations between predicates, and (2) provide a basic database for statistical learning system as well as a theoretical lexicon study such as Generative Lexicon and Lexical Conceptual Structure. One of the characteristics of our description is that we assume several granularities of semantic classes to characterize verb meanings. The thesaurus form allows us to provide several granularities of shared meanings; thus, this gives us a further revision for applying more detailed analyses of verb meanings.