Making a Semantic Event-type Ontology Multilingual

Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022), pages 1332–1343 Marseille, 20-25 June 2022 © European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC-4.0 1332 Making a Semantic Event-type Ontology Multilingual Zdeˇnka Ureˇsov´a1, Karolina Zaczynska2, Peter Bourgonje, Eva Fuˇc´ıkov´a1, Georg Rehm2, Jan Hajiˇc1 1Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic 2Deutsches Forschungszentrum f¨ur K¨unstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI), Berlin, Germany {uresova,fucikova,hajic}@ufal.mff.cuni.cz, {karolina.zaczynska,georg.rehm}@dfki.de, bourgonje@gmail.com Abstract We present an extension of the SynSemClass event-type ontology, originally conceived as a bilingual Czech-English resource. We added German entries to the classes representing the concepts of the ontology. Having a different starting point than the original work (unannotated parallel corpus without links to a valency lexicon and, of course, different existing lexical resources), it was a challenge to adapt the annotation guidelines, the data model and the tools used for the original version. We describe the process and results of working in such a setup. We also show the next steps to adapt the annotation process, data structures and formats and tools necessary to make the addition of a new language in the future more smooth and efficient, and possibly to allow for various teams to work on SynSemClass extensions to many languages concurrently. We also present the latest release which contains the results of adding German, freely available for download as well as for online access. Keywords: lexical resource, ontology, event, verb, valency, syntax, semantics, multilinguality, Czech, English, Ger- man 1 Introduction In Natural Language Processing (NLP), lexical re- sources play an important role for supporting the com- puter’s understanding of human language by providing gold standard data for NLP experiments and a wide range of NLP tasks and applications, such as infor- mation extraction, event extraction, sentence similar- ity, etc. This paper presents results of building a mul- tilingual semantic event-type ontology called SynSem- Class, a linguistic resource that can be used to compare semantic and syntactic properties across languages, which provides curated data for NLP experiments with cross-lingual synonyms, such as synonym discovery, feature mapping, etc. The main purpose of our lexicon is to represent the cross-lingual meaning of the state or event expressed by the set of verbs assigned to the individual synonym classes. We believe that multilingual synonyms support deeper understanding and comparability of verb usage in different languages. Our long-term aim is to cre- ate an event-type ontology that can be referenced and used as a human-readable and human-understandable database for all types of events, processes and states. Having the applicability for different tasks in mind, the granularity of the SynSemClass synonym classes are intermediate in granularity, between the relatively broad nature of FrameNet frames, and the often very fine-grained distinctions in WordNet verb senses. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We present a new workflow for extending the existing bilingual SynSemClass lexicon with new languages by example of German. The re-design of the annotation workflow was necessary as the original annotations for English-Czech were based on a parallel corpus with …

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