Natural language ontology of action, a gap with huge consequences for natural language understanding and machine translation

Action verbs are the less predictable linguistic type for bilingual dictionaries and they cause major problems for MT technologies that are immediately evident to the user. This is not only because of language specific phraseology, but is rather a consequence of the peculiar way each natural language categorizes events i.e. it is a consequence of semantic factors. In ordinary languages the most frequent Action verbs are “general”, since they extend productively to actions belonging to different ontological types. Moreover, each language categorizes action in its own way and therefore the cross-linguistic reference to everyday activities is puzzling. But the actual variation of verbs across action types is largely unknown. This paper sketches the problem constituted by the Ontology of Action when disambiguation and cross-linguistic reference to action is concerned and presents the IMAGACT Ontology Infrastructure, which aims at filling this gap by exploiting multilingual spoken corpora.