The semantics of verbs implies, as is known, a great number of difficulties, when it is to be represented in a computational lexicon. The Slavic languages are especially challenging in respect of this task because of the huge complexity of verbs, where the stems are combined with prefixes indicating aspect and Aktionsart. The current paper describes an approach to build PolVerbNet, a database for Polish verbs, considering the internal structure of the aspect-Aktionsart system. PolVerbNet is thus implemented in a larger English-Polish MT-system, which incorporates WordNet. We report our translation procedure and the system’s performance is evaluated and discussed.

The paper deals with the question whether representations of verb semantics formulated on the basis of a lexically and syntactically restricted domain (weather forecasts) can apply to other, less restricted textual domains. An analysis of a group of Polish polysemous verbs of motion, existence and appearance inspired by cognitive semantics, especially the metaphor theory, is presented, and the usefulness of the conceptual representations of the Polish motion/appearance/existence verbs for automatic translation of texts belonging to less restricted domains is evaluated and discussed.