Understanding the Current VerbNet

The first two resources provide comprehensive explanations of VerbNet's structure, components, and use, most of which applies to the current version of VerbNet. However, VerbNet's semantic representations and, to a lesser extent, its thematic roles have undergone significant revision. See the third resource (Brown et al., 2022) for a description of those revisions.

Titles link to the publisher or to an open-access copy where one is available.

  • 2022
    Brown, Susan Windisch; Bonn, Julia; Kazeminejad, Ghazaleh; Zaenen, Annie; Pustejovsky, James; Palmer, Martha.
    Semantic representations for nlp using verbnet and the generative lexicon
    Frontiers in artificial intelligence 5: 821697.
  • 2017
    Palmer, Martha; Bonial, Claire; Hwang, Jena D.
    VerbNet: Capturing English verb behavior, meaning and usage
    The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Science, ed. Susan Chipman. Oxford University Press.

Foundational Books and Papers

Titles link to the publisher or to an open-access copy where one is available.

Uses of VerbNet

Titles link to the publisher or to an open-access copy where one is available.

  • 2026
    Rim, Kyeongmin; Pustejovsky, James.
    Subevent structure as a predictor of entity identity change in procedural text
    In Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE).
  • 2026
    Ahmed, Wafaa; Ivy, Bassey P. U; Mapari, Suraj; Mahmoud, Ahmed; El-Batrawy, Hend.
    Exploring machine learning approaches to predicting semantic roles from syntactic frames
    In 2026 International Conference on Electronics and Renewable Systems (ICEARS), pp. 1807–1813. IEEE.
  • 2026
    Singh, Diksha P; Gusain, Divyansh; Bulgarelli, Federica; Hendricks, Anna E; Beavers, John; Beers, Nathan M; Nwogu, Ifeoma.
    A scalable tool for measuring manner and result verbs in developmental language research
    In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics (CDL), pp. 117–128.
  • 2026
    Farina, Alessia; Passarotti, Marco; Mambrini, Francesco; Pellegrini, Matteo; Moretti, Giovanni; Litta, Eleonora.
    PREMOVE In LiLa: Integrating Latin preverbed motion verbs with WordNet and VerbNet
    In The Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2026), pp. 3672–3683. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
  • 2023
    Li, Tao; Kazeminejad, Ghazaleh; Brown, Susan W; Srikumar, Vivek; Palmer, Martha.
    Learning semantic role labeling from compatible label sequences
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pp. 15561–15572.
  • 2023
    Grasso, Francesco; Rulfi, Valentina L; Caro, Luigi Di.
    Verbalignet: Unlocking multilingual exploration of verbal arguments
    In Research Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research, pp. 3–17. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
  • 2023
    Sowański, Maciej; Janicki, Artur.
    Optimizing machine translation for virtual assistants: Multi-variant generation with VerbNet and conditional beam search
    In 2023 18th Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems (FedCSIS), pp. 1149–1154. IEEE.
  • 2022
    Strelnikoff, Sonya; Jammalamadaka, Aditya; Lu, Tsai-Ching.
    Semantic causal abstraction for event prediction
    In International Cross-Domain Conference for Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction, pp. 188–200. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  • 2021
    Kazeminejad, Ghazaleh; Palmer, Martha; Li, Tao; Srikumar, Vivek.
    Automatic entity state annotation using the VerbNet semantic parser
    In Proceedings of the Joint 15th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) and 3rd Designing Meaning Representations (DMR) Workshop, pp. 123–132.
  • 2021
    Basu, Kinjal; Varanasi, Sarat Chandra; Shakerin, Farhad; Arias, Joaquín; Gupta, Gopal.
    Knowledge-driven natural language understanding of English text and its applications
    In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 35, No. 14, pp. 12554–12563).
  • 2020
    Diwanji, Prakhar; Guo, Hongkai; Singh, Munindar P; Kalia, Anup.
    Lin: Unsupervised extraction of tasks from textual communication
    In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 1815–1819.
  • 2020
    Amjad, Zainab; Ihsan, Iqra.
    VerbNet-based citation sentiment class assignment using machine learning
    International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, 11(9).
  • 2019
    Scicluna, Simon; Strapparava, Carlo.
    The visual representation of abstract verbs: merging verb classification with iconicity in sign language
    In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Computing (ICCC), pp. 73–80. IEEE.
  • 2017
    Wali, Wafa; Gargouri, Bilel; Hamadou, Abdelmajid Ben.
    Sentence similarity computation based on WordNet and VerbNet
    Computación y Sistemas, 21(4), pp. 627–635.
  • 2016
    Gerz, Daniela; Vulić, Ivan; Hill, Felix; Reichart, Roi; Korhonen, Anna.
    Simverb-3500: A large-scale evaluation set of verb similarity
    In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 2173–2182.

Linguistically Diverse VerbNets

Titles link to the publisher or to an open-access copy where one is available.

  • 2024
    Chungnoi, Kanthika; Kongkachandra, Rattapoom; Gulyanon, Signal.
    The computational method for supporting Thai VerbNet construction
    ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 23(2), pp. 1–15.
  • 2024
    Akram, Sana; Tahir, Muhammad Sarmad.
    Mapping of English and Punjabi verb classes; a corpus based study
    Journal of Arts and Linguistics Studies, 2(2), pp. 727–751.
  • 2023
    Vetulani, Zygmunt; Vetulani, Grażyna.
    Towards lexicon-grammar VerbNets through lexical ontologies
    Neophilologica, 35, pp. 1–32.
  • 2023
    Liu, Mei-chun.
    Semantic Annotation and Mandarin VerbNet
    In Chinese Language Resources: Data Collection, Linguistic Analysis, Annotation and Language Processing, pp. 187–210. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  • 2020
    Liu, Mei-chun.
    The construction and annotation of a semantically enriched database: the Mandarin VerbNet and its NLP applications
    From minimal contrast to meaning construct: Corpus-based, near synonym driven approaches to Chinese lexical semantics, pp. 257–272.
  • 2020
    Estarrona, Aitziber; Aldezabal, Izaskun; Díaz de Ilarraza, Arantza.
    How the corpus-based Basque Verb Index lexicon was built
    Language Resources and Evaluation, 54(1), pp. 73–95.
  • 2020
    Linh, Ha Manh; Huyen, Nguyen Thi Minh.
    Construction of a VerbNet style lexicon for Vietnamese
    In Proceedings of the 34th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pp. 84–91.
  • 2017
    Bick, Eckhard.
    From treebank to Propbank: A semantic-role and VerbNet corpus for Danish
    In Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 202–210.
  • 2016
    Danlos, Laurence; Pradet, Quentin; Barque, Lucie; Nakamura, Takuya; Constant, Matthieu.
    Un Verbenet du français [A Verbnet for French]
    Traitement automatique des langues, 57(1), pp. 33–58.
  • 2016
    Busso, Lucia; Lenci, Alessandro.
    Italian VerbNet: a construction-based approach to Italian verb classification
    In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016), pp. 2633–2642. ELRA.
  • 2016
    Hautli-Janisz, Annette.
    See the forest and the trees: visual verb class identification in Urdu/Hindi VerbNet
    VisLR II: Visualization as Added Value in the Development, Use and Evaluation of Language Resources, p. 16.
  • 2015
    Hautli, Annette; King, Tracy Holloway; Ramchand, Gillian.
    Encoding event structure in urdu/hindi verbnet
    In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on EVENTS: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation, pp. 25–33.
  • 2014
    Pradet, Quentin; Danlos, Laurence; De Chalendar, Gaël.
    Adapting VerbNet to French using existing resources
    In LREC'14 - Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.
  • 2014
    Scarton, Carolina; Duran, Magali Sanches; Aluísio, Sandra M.
    Using cross-linguistic knowledge to build VerbNet-style lexicons: Results for a (Brazilian) Portuguese VerbNet
    In Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language: 11th International Conference, PROPOR 2014, pp. 149–160. Springer International Publishing.
  • 2012
    Scarton, Carolina; Aluísio, Sandra.
    Towards a cross-linguistic VerbNet-style lexicon for Brazilian Portuguese
    In Workshop on Creating Cross-language Resources for Disconnected Languages and Styles Workshop Programme, p. 11.
  • 2011
    Mousser, Jaouad.
    Classifying arabic verbs using sibling classes
    In the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Oxford, UK.
  • 2010
    Sun, Lin; Korhonen, Anna; Poibeau, Thierry; Messiant, Cédric.
    Investigating the cross-linguistic potential of VerbNet-style classification
    In CoLing 2010, p. 94.
  • 2010
    Mousser, Jaouad.
    A Large Coverage Verb Taxonomy for Arabic
    In LREC.
  • 2008
    Liu, Mei-chun; Chiang, Ting-yi.
    The construction of Mandarin VerbNet: A frame-based study of statement verbs
    Language and Linguistics 9, no. 2: 239–270.