An Evaluation of the Brandeis Semantic Ontology

The Brandeis Semantic Ontology (BSO) is a new English resource in the generative lexicon tradition. Although still in development, the BSO is a sizable resource containing both a type system and a network of qualia relations. In this paper, we demonstrate that the BSO tends to contain correct qualia relationships by matching the current progress on the BSO with two different sources for qualia relation pairs. We compare with pairs semi-automatically selected from the British National Corpus and pairs automatically extracted from ConceptNet. We find that the current BSO data matches well with the extracted qualia pairs, but that the BSO is missing many of the qualia relations that could be extracted from corpora. We briefly propose a course of action to correct this problem.