<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C96-2204">
  <Title>Constructing Verb Semantic Classes for French: Methods and Evaluation</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="1129" end_page="1129" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Perspectives
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The semantic characterization of contexts should allow us to construct verb semantic classes on a stronger basis, and with a clear method. We have carried out preliminary experiments on transfer of possession verbs which confirm this hypothesis. Besides these results, it is of much interest to study how WN and VS classification systems can cooperate and can contribute to defining the syntax and the semantics of verbs, in a quite comprehensive and fine-grained way. It should be noted that we consider that the syntax-based approach (VS) is the most stable and the most forreal approach, it should therefore be the central element of our classification strategy. WN criteria are extremely useful, but they remain nevertheless somewhat intuitive and less connected to language realizations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Our ultimate goal, from this perspective, is to associate with families of verb classes, verb classes and possibly individual verbs, hierarchically organize.d semantic representations, under the form of partially instanciated LCS-based semantic representations (a sucessfull experiment in this direction has been carried out for English by (Voss and Dorr 95), and also by ourselves on verbs of transfer of possession) and ontological knowledge.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Acknowledgements I thank Bonnie Dorr, Martha Palmer, Beth Levin, Doug Jones and Pahnira Marrafa for discussions that helped improving this research. Many thanks also to Alda Mart who carried out parts of the syntactic descriptions of verbs.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>