CzEngClass – Towards a Lexicon of Verb Synonyms with Valency Linked to Semantic Roles

In this paper, we introduce our ongoing project about synonymy in bilingual context. This project aims at exploring semantic ‘equivalence’ of verb senses of generally different verbal lexemes in a bilingual (Czech-English) setting. Specifically, it focuses on their valency behavior within such equivalence groups. We believe that using bilingual context (translation) as an important factor in the delimitation of classes of synonymous lexical units (verbs, in our case) may help to specify the verb senses, also with regard to the (semantic) roles relation to other verb senses and roles of their arguments more precisely than when using monolingual corpora. In our project, we work “bottom-up”, i.e., from an evidence as recorded in our corpora and not “top-down”, from a predefined set of semantic classes.