This paper describes an approach to large-scale construction of a semantic hierarchy for Chinese verbs. Leveraging off of an existing Chinese conceptual database called HowNet and a Levin-based English verb classification, we use thematic-role information to create links between Chinese concepts and English classes. The resulting hierarchy is used for multilingual lexicons in an English-Chinese cross-language information retrieval application. We demonstrate a structured syntax interface that exploits this large-scale hierarchy and its linkages to WordNet for English-Chinese cross-language information retrieval. (Also cross-referenced asUMIACS-TR-2000-36) (Also cross-referenced as LAMP-TR-043)