Visual Semantics and Ontology of Eventive Verbs

Various English verb classifications have been analyzed in terms of their syntactic and semantic properties, and conceptual components, such as syntactic valency, lexical semantics, and semantic/syntactic correlations. Here the visual semantics of verbs, particularly their visual roles, somatotopic effectors, and level-of-detail, is studied. We introduce the notion of visual valency and use it as a primary criterion to recategorize eventive verbs for language visualization (animation) in our intelligent multimodal storytelling system, CONFUCIUS. The visual valency approach is a framework for modelling deeper semantics of verbs. In our ontological system we consider both language and visual modalities since CONFUCIUS is a multimodal system.