The VerbCorner Project: Toward an Empirically-Based Semantic Decomposition of Verbs

This research describes efforts to use crowdsourcing to improve the validity of the semantic predicates in VerbNet, a lexicon of about 6300 English verbs. The current semantic predicates can be thought of semantic primitives, into which the concepts denoted by a verb can be decomposed. For example, the verb spray (of the Spray class), involves the predicates MOTION, NOT, and LOCATION, where the event can be decomposed into an AGENT causing a THEME that was originally not in a particular location to now be in that location. Although VerbNet’s predicates are theoretically well-motivated, systematic empirical data is scarce. This paper describes a recently-launched attempt to address this issue with a series of human judgment tasks, posed to subjects in the form of games.