Expanding Verb Coverage in Cyc with VerbNet

A robust dictionary of semantic frames is an essential element of natural language understanding systems that use ontologies. However, creating lexical resources that accurately capture semantic representations en masse is a persistent problem. Where the sheer amount of content makes hand creation inefficient, computerized approaches often suffer from over generality and difficulty with sense disambiguation. This paper describes a semi-automatic method to create verb semantic frames in the Cyc ontology by converting the information contained in VerbNet into a Cyc usable format. This method captures the differences in meaning between types of verbs, and uses existing connections between WordNet, VerbNet, and Cyc to specify distinctions between individual verbs when available. This method provides 27,909 frames to OpenCyc which currently has none and can be used to extend ResearchCyc as well. We show that these frames lead to a 20% increase in sample sentences parsed over the Research Cyc verb lexicon.