Linking the Ancient Greek WordNet to the Homeric Dependency Lexicon

The Ancient Greek WordNet is a new resource that is being developed at the Universities of Pavia and Exeter, based on the Princeton WordNet. The Princeton WordNet provides sentence frames for verb senses, but this type of information is lacking in most WordNets of other languages. In fact, exporting sentence frames from English to other languages is not a trivial task, as sentence frames depend on the syntax of individual languages. In addition, the information provided by the Princeton WordNet is not corpus-based but relies on native speakers’ knowledge. This type of information is not available for dead languages, which are by definition corpus languages. In this paper, we show how sentence frames can be extracted from morpho-syntactically parsed corpora by linking an existing depend- ency lexicon of Homeric verbs (HoDeL) to verbs in the Ancient Greek WordNet. Given its features, HoDeL allows automatically extracting all subcategorization frames available for each verb along with information concerning their frequency as well as semantic information regarding the possible arguments occurring in specific frames. In the paper, we show our method to automatically link the two resources and compare some of the resulting sentence frames with the English sentence frames in the Princeton WordNet.