Verb Predicates, Meaning and Multilinguality

This paper summarizes some of the research on verb predicates that has taken place at the University of Central Florida during the last few years. It also describes how this research may be related to the MEANING project. The point is made that the de nition of predicates linked to a general ontology, such as that of WordNet, and to grammatical relations can solve the crucial issues of verb and prepositional meaning and thematic roles. Also, it is suggested that a broad ontology of predicates, which would be language-free as far as ontological categories is concerned, could be extended relatively easy to other languages, resulting into ontologies of predicates similar to the di erent \wordnets" that have emerged from WordNet. This ontology of predicates could facilitate multilingual tasks such as information retrieval and machine translation, as well as deeper monolingual natural language processing tasks, such as under-