Expanding VerbNet with Sketch Engine

This research describes efforts to expand the lexical resource VerbNet with additional class members and completely new verb classes. Several approaches to this in the past have involved automatic methods for expansion, but this research focuses on the addition of frequent, yet particularly challenging verbs that require manual additions after a survey of each verb’s syntactic behaviors and semantic features. Sketch Engine has been an invaluable tool in this process, allowing for a comprehensive, yet detailed view of the behavior of a given verb, along with efficient comparisons to the behaviors of other verbs that might be included in VerbNet already. The incorporation of light verbs into VerbNet has presented particular challenges to this process, these are described along with a proposed resource to supplement VerbNet with information on light