The Predicate Matrix and the Event and Implied Situation Ontology: Making More of Events

This paper presents the Event and Implied Situation Ontology (ESO), a resource which formalizes the pre and post situations of events and the roles of the entities affected by an event. The ontology reuses and maps across existing resources such as WordNet, SUMO, VerbNet, PropBank and FrameNet. We describe how ESO is injected into a new version of the Predicate Matrix and illustrate how these resources are used to detect information in large document collections that otherwise would have remained implicit. The model targets interpretations of situations rather than the semantics of verbs per se. The event is interpreted as a situation using RDF taking all event components into account. Hence, the ontology and the linked resources need to be considered from the perspective of this interpretation model.