Disambiguation of Basic Action Types through Nouns' Telic Qualia

Knowledge about semantic associations between words is effective to disambiguate word senses. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role and the relevance of telic information from SIMPLE in the disambiguation of basic action types of Italian HOLD verbs ( prendere, 'to take', raccogliere, 'to pick up', pigliare 'to grab' etc.). We propose an experiment to compare the results obtained with telic information from SIMPLE with basic co-occurrence information extracted from corpora (most salient verbs modifying nouns) classified in terms of general semantic classes to avoid data sparseness.