Where’s the Meeting that was Cancelled? Existential Implications of Transitive Verbs

This paper describes a preliminary classification of transitive verbs in terms of the implications of existence (or non-existence) associated with their direct object nominal arguments. The classification was built to underlie the lexical marking of verbs in the lexical resources that the automated system BRIDGE developed at Xerox PARC used for textual inference. Similar classifications are required for other logic-based textual inference systems, but very little is written about the issue.