Unveiling Spatial-Temporal Markers and Identifying Adverbial Associations for Different Verb Types in Hindi: Developing OntoSenseNet as a Lexical Ontological Resource

Abstract

This thesis explores the pivotal role of verbs in the semantics of natural language understanding, highlighting their essential function in expressing actions or states within sentences. Verbs convey the main idea or action and are critical in expressing tense, aspect, and mood, as well as establishing subject-verb agreement. These aspects make verbs central to unfolding sentence meaning. To computationally specify the meaning of a sentence, the research considers both ontological and linguistic aspects of verbs and other parts of speech. Ontology provides a framework for organizing and classifying the concepts and entities referred to in a sentence, aiding in the precise derivation of meaning. This thesis utilizes various theories of formal ontology, including Montague grammar, situation semantics, generative semantics, cognitive semantics, and verb semantic-based ontology, to deepen the understanding of the relationship between language and meaning. The primary objective of this research is to develop a resource for the Hindi language using the formal ontology of language This resource is employed to analyze verb-adverb collocations in Hindi, exploring the relations of spatial and temporal markers with ontological categories. The thesis is organized into seven chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the research problems and objectives. Chapter 2 elaborates on the theoretical framework of verb and adverb ontological classification. Chapter 3 describes the manual annotation procedures for Hindi and provides validation. Chapter 4 discusses the automatic identification of verb sense-types and adverb sense-classes. Chapter 5 presents a corpus-based analysis of verb types with spatial and temporal markers in Hindi. Chapter 6 investigates verb-adverb collocations in Hindi through a corpus-based approach, employing statistical measures like log-likelihood to assess association strength. Finally, Chapter 7 summarizes the research findings and conclusions.