VerbCROcean: A Repository of Fine-Grained Semantic Verb Relations for Croatian

In this paper we describe VERBCROCEAN, a broad-coverage repository of fine-grained semantic relations between Croatian verbs. Adopting the methodology of Chklovski and Pantel (2004) used for acquiring the English VerbOcean, we first acquire semantically related verb pairs from a web corpus hrWaC by relying on distributional similarity of subject-verb-object paths in the dependency trees. We then classify the semantic relations between each pair of verbs as similarity, intensity, antonymy, or happens-before, using a number of manually-constructed lexico-syntatic patterns. We evaluate the quality of the resulting resource on a manually annotated sample of 1000 semantic verb relations. The evaluation revealed that the predictions are most accurate for the similarity relation, and least accurate for the intensity relation. We make available two variants of VERBCROCEAN: a coverage-oriented version, containing about 36k verb pairs at a precision of 41%, and a precision-oriented version containing about 5k verb pairs, at a precision of 56%.