The creation of the Catalan Lexicon SenSem (acronym for Sentence Semantics) began in 2008 and continues in 2014. It has been funded by the Government of Spain (Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia HUM2007-65267).

In its 1.1 version, this resource contains the description of around 1,300 verbs that, in turn, correspond to around 320 lemmas. The description of verbs features information that can be divided into two groups. In the first place, the data that have been codified manually: the definition, the synset of WordNet (versions 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0), the Aktionsart and the number of arguments and their semantic functions.

In the second place, one will find the information that has been automatically extracted from the Catalan SenSem Corpus (a collection of journalistic texts): frequency of the verb in the corpus, all the subcategorization patterns, their frequency and examples.

Subcategorization patterns are described at four different levels. In the first, the most abstract level, general patterns are codified. In it, certain syntactic categories have been merged (as in the case of NP and pronoun or infinitive clause) and the order of constituents has been reorganized so as to display the unmarked Catalan word order (subject, direct object, indirect object, prepositional object, and other objects).

In the second level, the semantics of the construction is specified for every pattern by differentiating between two large types of constructions: logical subject topicalization or logical subject detopicalization.

In the third level, syntactic categories are specified by following a great degree of granularity (proper noun, interrogative pronoun, etc.).

Lastly, the actual order of the constituents that make up the subcategorization pattern is presented. It is pointed out whether this order follows or not the neutral Catalan word order. At the same time, it is specified whether the sentences have any other non-argumental constituents (i.e. adjuncts).

The lexicon of the Catalan SenSem Databank contains a great amount of information that is especially interesting and useful in several fields, namely, language teaching/acquisition, lexicography and natural language processing (NLP). With regard to language teaching/acquisition, the information about the verbs and their syntax constitutes, undoubtedly, a very valuable resource. In the area of lexicography, the information about subcategorization patterns may be used in order to improve the description of the verbal lexicographic entries. Lastly, in the highly active field of NLP, the information that is included in the verbal subcategorization patterns may be used to provide guidance for automatic syntactic analyses and to improve results in this field. It can also lead to better results in the automatic disambiguation of meanings.

One can search the lexicon online through the search engine available on the web site http://grial.uab.es/sensem/lexico. On this webpage, more specific documentation can be accessed, such as the definition of the terms used and their equivalence in other projects. All the publications related to this project can be consulted at http://grial.uab.es/publicacions.php.