In the not too distant future we anticipate the existence of robots that will help around the house, in particular, the kitchen. Thus, it is critical that robots can understand the language commonly used within this domain. Therefore, in this work we explore the semantics of verbs that frequently occur when describing cooking activities. Motivated by linguistic theory on the lexical semantics of concrete action verbs and data collected via crowdsourcing, an ontology of the changes of states of the physical world as denoted by concrete action verbs is presented. Furthermore, additional datasets are collected for the purpose of validating the ontology, exploring the effects of context on verbal change of state semantics, and testing the automatic identification of changes of state denoted by verbs. In conclusion, several areas of further investigation are suggested.
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