The relationships that form the conceptual structure of thesauri can be more readily understood to humans and machines when explicitly represented. In general, this representation is realized through the use of verbs or verb phrases. For this reason, Linguistics provided important theoretical contributions. The approach discussed here was developed by Borba (1996), which based his study on the Grammar of Valence and Grammar of Cases theories and used in the representation of relationships in knowledge organization systems (KOSs) of the thesaurus type. This approach focuses on the verb grammar class and its different thematic roles in a sentence. The results showed that the existing relationships in a thesaurus cannot be separated from the domain analyzed as well as the verb needs to be in context to be understood. Both meanings of the relationship and the verb result from a localized social construction.
Verbal valence; Grammar of valences; Grammar of Cases; Thesaurus; Knowledge organization system
