How Text Mining Can Help Lexical and Commonsense Knowledgebase Construction

In an enterprise called "deep lexical semantics", we develop various core theories of fundamental commonsense phenomena and define English word senses by means of axioms using predicates explicated in these theories. This enables deep inferences that require commonsense knowledge about how the world functions. There are difficulties in our approach to manually axiomatize words and commonsense knowledge. First, developing axioms is done by experts and this means the process is slow and expensive. Second, it is hard, if possible at all, to predict in advance all the kinds of axioms that should be encoded in core theories. In this paper we present a method for harvesting from free-form text on the web, simple axioms for change-of-state verbs which is a combination of textmining and manual filtering. Focusing on two change-ofstate verbs, ―break‖ and ―cut‖, we show how the harvested axioms can help in addressing the above problems.