Inferring and evaluating semantic classes of verbs signaling modality

We infer semantic classes of verbs signaling modality from a purely syntactic classification of 637 German verbs by applying findings from linguistics about correspondences between verb meaning and syntax. Our extensive evaluation of the semantic classification is based on a linking to three other lexical resources at the word sense level: to the German wordnet GermaNet and to the English resources VerbNet and FrameNet. This way, we are able to perform a reproducible semantic characterization of the inferred German classes. We also perform a corpus-based evaluation revealing that the frequencies of the classes in corpora of different genres are significantly different. We will make the resulting bilingual resource of German–English semantically categorized verb classes publicly available.