1998 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Disambiguating Verbs with the WordNet Category of the Direct Object

Siegel, Eric V.

In this paper, I demonstrate that verbs can be disambiguated according to aspect by rules that examine the WordNet category of the direct object. First, when evaluated over a corpus of medical reports, I show that WordNet categories correlate with aspectual class. Then, I develop a rule for distinguishing between stative and event occurrences of have by the WordNet category of the direct object. This rule, which is motivated by both linguistic and statistical analysis, is evaluated over an unrestricted set of nouns. I also show that WordNet categories improve a system that performs aspectual classification with linguistically-based numerical indicators.