Construction of Semantic Structure for English Verbs Based on Valence Theory and Sementic Field Theory

Abstract

This paper aims to depict a structure among English verbs based on valence theory and semantic field theory in order to merge their syntagmantic knowledge with the paradigmatic knowledge. After analyzing 500 sentences from BNC, 4 semantic roles were summarized in the structure, i.e. Agent, Object, Direction and Experiencer. Valence values of verbs in the structure are described in 3 aspects: the number of arguments they are able to combine with, the semantic roles these arguments plays and semantic restriction on features of these arguments. The structure also borrows ideas from the paradigmatic-oriented semantic field theory to describe semantic knowledge of a verb from the perspective of its hyponyms, entailment, cause-to relations and semantic fields. These features combined can help build syntagmantic relations between verbs and nouns, which can be used in word sense disambiguity and machine translation.