---
title: "A Categorial Variation Database for English — Habash 2003"
description: "English words often have derivational relatives in other parts of speech, such as a verb, a noun and… 32 references, cited by 47 papers here."
authors: ["Nizar Habash", "Bonnie Dorr"]
year: 2003
venue: "Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/N03-1013/"
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licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/habash-2003-categorial-variation-database-english/"
---
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# A Categorial Variation Database for English

**Authors:** [Nizar Habash](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/nizar-habash/) and [Bonnie Dorr](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/bonnie-dorr/) · **Year:** 2003 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/naacl/) ([NAACL 2003](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/naacl/2003/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/N03-1013/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/N03-1013.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2158738110)

**Citations:** 86 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [47](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/habash-2003-categorial-variation-database-english/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
English words often have derivational relatives in other parts of speech, such as a verb, a noun and an adjective built on the same root. No large-scale English resource recorded these cross-category links, and WordNet linked words only within a single part of speech. Habash and Dorr built CatVar, a database that groups English lexemes into clusters of categorial variants. They started from seed links taken from curated lexicons (Englex, NOMLEX, LDOCE). They added lexeme coverage from the LCS databases, WordNet 1.6 and the Brown Corpus portion of the Penn Treebank. Porter-stem clustering then grew the seeds into full clusters. Every link records which source produced it. Human annotators judged a sample of clusters, which gave high precision and good recall. A linkability analysis showed that about 30% of CatVar's links cannot be found with the Porter stemmer. The resource works in both directions: it can collapse word forms for analysis and expand them for generation. It has been used in machine translation, headline generation and bilingual alignment.

## Key points
- CatVar 2.0 has 62,232 clusters covering 96,368 lexemes (nouns 62%, adjectives 24%, verbs 10%, adverbs 4%).
  - About half of the clusters contain a single word.
  - Multi-word clusters range from 2 to 27 words and follow a Zipf-like distribution.
- A separate verb–preposition database (e.g., enter/into, avoid/away from) was built from shared LCS primitives. It has 242 clusters linking 230+ verbs and 29 prepositions.
- Evaluation used 400 adjudicated clusters containing 808 words.
  - Precision was 91.82% and recall 72.46%, giving an F-score of 81.00%.
  - Recall rises to 87.16% (F 89.43%) when words that were present in CatVar but placed in other clusters are not counted as missing.
- The linkability analysis covered 48,867 linked words, 14,731 clusters and 89,638 links.
  - About 12% of links involve identical forms across categories ("natural" links).
  - About 70% can be recovered by the Porter stemmer.
  - The remaining roughly 30% come only from CatVar.
- CatVar was applied in three systems:
  - GHMT, where it constrains when a light verb can merge with its argument;
  - HeadGen, where it helps check that a headline contains an event;
  - DUSTer, for untangling translation divergences during bilingual alignment.
- For IR use, CatVar needs an inflectional analyzer that first reduces words to their lexemes.

## Interesting ideas
- Each link is tagged with the source that produced it, so an application can use only the subset it needs; HeadGen scored higher Bleu with the NOMLEX-related slice
- One shared resource serves both reduction (many forms to one cluster) and expansion (one root to its valid variants), avoiding the over- and under-coverage of a one-way stemmer or a free-running generator
- A light verb plus an event noun can be merged into one verb only if the noun has a verb variant in the database (e.g., "make … development" becomes "develop")
- "Linkability" splits a resource's links by which cheap method could also find them (identical form, Porter stem), isolating what the resource really adds over a baseline
- In evaluation, words "missing" from a cluster but present elsewhere in the database are separated from truly absent words, distinguishing linking errors from coverage gaps

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): Compiled knowledge (verb classes, ontology links) could carry provenance tags, letting each reader choose trusted sources and keeping every inference traceable to a resource.
- **I2** (back): Generation could draw nominal, verbal or adjectival realizations of a concept from the same clusters the analyzer uses, so text → graph → text round-trips stay symmetric.
- **I3** (frames): Phrases like "made a decision" or "gave a promise" could be mapped to the frame of the related verb and its VerbNet roles when a categorial link exists.
- **I4** (learn): Any induced lexicon or repair-rule set could be scored by the share of its output that a trivial baseline could not produce, which acts as a built-in negative control.
- **I5** (learn): When evaluating silver data or lexical resources, wrongly attached items could be reported apart from absent ones, so repair work targets the right failure type.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Maryland, College Park](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-maryland-college-park/) — University, College Park, United States · 132 works · 25,380 citations

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🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,263 works

## Cite

Cite as: Nizar Habash and Bonnie Dorr. 2003. A Categorial Variation Database for English. Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{habash2003categorial,
  title = {{A Categorial Variation Database for English}},
  author = {Nizar Habash and Bonnie Dorr},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2003},
  doi = {10.3115/1073445.1073458},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1073445.1073458}
}
```

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*Updated 1 November 2026*