Mapping a corpus-induced ontology of action verbs on ItalWordNet

Action verbs are the less predictable linguistic type for bilingual dictionaries and they cause major problems for NLP technologies. This is not only because of language specific phraseology, but it is rather a consequence of the peculiar way each language categorizes events. In ordinary languages the most frequent action verbs are “general”, since they extend productively to actions belonging to different ontological types. Moreover, each language categorizes actions in its own way and therefore the cross-linguistic reference to everyday activities is puzzling. A cross-linguistic stable ontology of actions is difficult to achieve because our knowledge on the actual variation of verbs across types of actions is largely unknown. This paper briefly presents the problems and the building strategies of the IMAGACT Ontology, which aims at filling this gap, and compares some early results on a set of Italian verbs with the information contained in ItalWordNet.