Can Subcategorisation Probabilities Help a Statistical Parser?

Research into the automatic acquisition of lexical information from corpora is starting to produce large-scale computational lexicons containing data on the relative frequencies of subcategorisation alternatives for individual verbal predicates. However, the empirical question of whether this type of frequency information can in practice improve the accuracy of a statistical parser has not yet been answered. In this paper we describe an experiment with a wide-coverage statistical grammar and parser for English and subcategorisation frequencies acquired from ten million words of text which shows that this information can significantly improve parse accuracy.Comment: 9 pages, uses colacl.st

D6.1: Technologies and Tools for Lexical Acquisition

This report describes the technologies and tools to be used for Lexical Acquisition in PANACEA. It includes descriptions of existing technologies and tools which can be built on and improved within PANACEA, as well as of new technologies and tools to be developed and integrated in PANACEA platform. The report also specifies the Lexical Resources to be produced. Four main areas of lexical acquisition are included: Subcategorization frames (SCFs), Selectional Preferences (SPs), Lexical-semantic Classes (LCs), for both nouns and verbs, and Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs)

The PAIS? Corpus of Italian Web Texts

PAISA\u27 is a Creative Commons licensed, large web corpus of contemporary Italian. We describe the design, harvesting, and processing steps involved in its creation

VP-fronting in Czech and Polish : a case study in corpus-oriented grammar research

Fronting of an infinite VP across a finite main verb - akin to German "VP-topicalization" - can be found also in Czech and Polish. The paper discusses evidence from large corpora for this process and some of its properties, both syntactic and information-structural. Based on this case, criteria for more user-friedly searching and retrieval of corpus data in syntactic research are being developed

D7.1. Criteria for evaluation of resources, technology and integration.

This deliverable defines how evaluation is carried out at each integration cycle in the PANACEA project. As PANACEA aims at producing large scale resources, evaluation becomes a critical and challenging issue. Critical because it is important to assess the quality of the results that should be delivered to users. Challenging because we prospect rather new areas, and through a technical platform: some new methodologies will have to be explored or old ones to be adapted

Syntaxe computationnelle du hongrois : de l'analyse en chunks à la sous-catégorisation verbale

We present the creation of two resources for Hungarian NLP applications: a rule-based shallow parser and a database of verbal subcategorization frames. Hungarian, as a non-configurational language with a rich morphology, presents specific challenges for NLP at the level of morphological and syntactic processing. While efficient and precise morphological analyzers are already available, Hungarian is under-resourced with respect to syntactic analysis. Our work aimed at overcoming this problem by providing resources for syntactic processing. Hungarian language is characterized by a rich morphology and a non-configurational encoding of grammatical functions. These features imply that the syntactic processing of Hungarian has to rely on morphological features rather than on constituent order. The broader interest of our undertaking is to propose representations and methods that are adapted to these specific characteristics, and at the same time are in line with state of the art research methodologies. More concretely, we attempt to adapt current results in argument realization and lexical semantics to the task of labeling sentence constituents according to their syntactic function and semantic role in Hungarian. Syntax and semantics are not completely independent modules in linguistic analysis and language processing: it has been known for decades that semantic properties of words affect their syntactic distribution. Within the syntax-semantics interface, the field of argument realization deals with the (partial or complete) prediction of verbal subcategorization from semantic properties. Research on verbal lexical semantics and semantically motivated mapping has been concentrating on predicting the syntactic realization of arguments, taking for granted (either explicitly or implicitly) that the distinction between arguments and adjuncts is known, and that adjuncts' syntactic realization is governed by productive syntactic rules, not lexical properties. However, besides the correlation between verbal aspect or actionsart and time adverbs (e.g. Vendler, 1967 or Kiefer, 1992 for Hungarian), the distribution of adjuncts among verbs or verb classes did not receive significant attention, especially within the lexical semantics framework. We claim that contrary to the widely shared presumption, adjuncts are often not fully productive. We therefore propose a gradual notion of productivity, defined in relation to Levin-type lexical semantic verb classes (Levin, 1993; Levin and Rappaport-Hovav, 2005). The definition we propose for the argument-adjunct dichotomy is based on evidence from Hungarian and exploits the idea that lexical semantics not only influences complement structure but is the key to the argument-adjunct distinction and the realization of adjunctsLa linguistique informatique est un domaine de recherche qui se concentre sur les méthodes et les perspectives de la modélisation formelle (statistique ou symbolique) de la langue naturelle. La linguistique informatique, tout comme la linguistique théorique, est une discipline fortement modulaire : les niveaux d'analyse linguistique comprennent la segmentation, l'analyse morphologique, la désambiguïsation, l'analyse syntaxique et sémantique. Tandis qu'un nombre d'outils existent déjà pour les traitements de bas niveau (analyse morphologique, étiquetage grammatical), le hongrois peut être considéré comme une langue peu doté pour l'analyse syntaxique et sémantique. Le travail décrit dans la présente thèse vise à combler ce manque en créant des ressources pour le traitement syntaxique du hongrois : notamment, un analyseur en chunks et une base de données lexicale de schémas de sous-catégorisation verbale. La première partie de la recherche présentée ici se concentre sur la création d'un analyseur syntaxique de surface (ou analyseur en chunks) pour le hongrois. La sortie de l'analyseur de surface est conçue pour servir d'entrée pour un traitement ultérieur visant à annoter les relations de dépendance entre le prédicat et ses compléments essentiels et circonstanciels. L'analyseur profond est mis en œuvre dans NooJ (Silberztein, 2004) en tant qu'une cascade de grammaires. Le deuxième objectif de recherche était de proposer une représentation lexicale pour la structure argumentale en hongrois. Cette représentation doit pouvoir gérer la vaste gamme de phénomènes qui échappent à la dichotomie traditionnelle entre un complément essentiel et un circonstanciel (p. ex. des structures partiellement productives, des écarts entre la prédictibilité syntaxique et sémantique). Nous avons eu recours à des résultats de la recherche récente sur la réalisation d'arguments et choisi un cadre qui répond à nos critères et qui est adaptable à une langue non-configurationnelle. Nous avons utilisé la classification sémantique de Levin (1993) comme modèle. Nous avons adapté les notions relatives à cette classification, à savoir celle de la composante sémantique et celle de l'alternance syntaxique, ainsi que la méthodologie d'explorer et de décrire le comportement des prédicats à l'aide de cette représentation, à la tâche de construire une représentation lexicale des verbes dans une langue non-configurationnelle. La première étape consistait à définir les règles de codage et de construire un vaste base de données lexicale pour les verbes et leurs compléments. Par la suite, nous avons entrepris deux expériences pour l'enrichissement de ce lexique avec des informations sémantiques lexicales afin de formaliser des généralisations syntaxiques et sémantiques pertinentes sur les classes de prédicats sous-jacentes. La première approche que nous avons testée consistait en une élaboration manuelle de classification de verbes en fonction de leur structure de compléments et de l'attribution de rôles sémantiques à ces compléments. Nous avons cherché la réponse aux questions suivantes: quelles sont les composants sémantiques pertinents pour définir une classification sémantique des prédicats hongrois? Quelles sont les implications syntaxiques spécifiques à ces classes? Et, plus généralement, quelle est la nature des alternances spécifiques aux classes verbales en hongrois ? Dans la phase finale de la recherche, nous avons étudié le potentiel de l'acquisition automatique pour extraire des classes de verbes à partir de corpus. Nous avons effectué une classification non supervisée, basée sur des données distributionnelles, pour obtenir une classification sémantique pertinente des verbes hongrois. Nous avons également testé la méthode de classification non supervisée sur des données françaises

Proceedings of the COLING 2004 Post Conference Workshop on Multilingual Linguistic Ressources MLR2004

International audienceIn an ever expanding information society, most information systems are now facing the "multilingual challenge". Multilingual language resources play an essential role in modern information systems. Such resources need to provide information on many languages in a common framework and should be (re)usable in many applications (for automatic or human use). Many centres have been involved in national and international projects dedicated to building har- monised language resources and creating expertise in the maintenance and further development of standardised linguistic data. These resources include dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, word-nets, and annotated corpora developed along the lines of best practices and recommendations. However, since the late 90's, most efforts in scaling up these resources remain the responsibility of the local authorities, usually, with very low funding (if any) and few opportunities for academic recognition of this work. Hence, it is not surprising that many of the resource holders and developers have become reluctant to give free access to the latest versions of their resources, and their actual status is therefore currently rather unclear. The goal of this workshop is to study problems involved in the development, management and reuse of lexical resources in a multilingual context. Moreover, this workshop provides a forum for reviewing the present state of language resources. The workshop is meant to bring to the international community qualitative and quantitative information about the most recent developments in the area of linguistic resources and their use in applications. The impressive number of submissions (38) to this workshop and in other workshops and conferences dedicated to similar topics proves that dealing with multilingual linguistic ressources has become a very hot problem in the Natural Language Processing community. To cope with the number of submissions, the workshop organising committee decided to accept 16 papers from 10 countries based on the reviewers' recommendations. Six of these papers will be presented in a poster session. The papers constitute a representative selection of current trends in research on Multilingual Language Resources, such as multilingual aligned corpora, bilingual and multilingual lexicons, and multilingual speech resources. The papers also represent a characteristic set of approaches to the development of multilingual language resources, such as automatic extraction of information from corpora, combination and re-use of existing resources, online collaborative development of multilingual lexicons, and use of the Web as a multilingual language resource. The development and management of multilingual language resources is a long-term activity in which collaboration among researchers is essential. We hope that this workshop will gather many researchers involved in such developments and will give them the opportunity to discuss, exchange, compare their approaches and strengthen their collaborations in the field. The organisation of this workshop would have been impossible without the hard work of the program committee who managed to provide accurate reviews on time, on a rather tight schedule. We would also like to thank the Coling 2004 organising committee that made this workshop possible. Finally, we hope that this workshop will yield fruitful results for all participants

A journey through learner language: tracking development using POS tag sequences in large-scale learner data

This PhD study comes at a cross-roads of SLA studies and corpus linguistics methodology, using a bottom-up data-first approach to throw light on second language development. Taking POS tag n-gram sequences as a starting point, searching the data from the outermost syntactic layer available in corpus tools, it is an investigation of grammatical development in learner language across the six proficiency levels in the 52-million-word CEFR-benchmarked quasi-longitudinal Cambridge Learner Corpus. It takes a mixed methods approach, first examining the frequency and distribution of POS tag sequences by level, identifying convergence and divergence, and secondly looking qualitatively at form-meaning mappings of sequences at differing levels. It seeks to observe if there are sequences which characterise levels and which might index the transition between levels. It investigates sequence use at a lexical and functional level and explores whether this can contribute to our understanding of how a generic repertoire of learner language develops. It aims to contribute to the theoretical debate by looking critically at how current theories of language development and description might account for learner language development. It responds to the call to look at largescale learner data, and benefits from privileged access to such longitudinal data, acknowledging the limitations of any corpus data and the need to triangulate across different datasets. It seeks to illustrate how L2 language use converges and diverges across proficiency levels and to investigate convergence and divergence between L1 and L2 usage.N

Grammar and Corpora 2016

In recent years, the availability of large annotated corpora, together with a new interest in the empirical foundation and validation of linguistic theory and description, has sparked a surge of novel work using corpus methods to study the grammar of natural languages. This volume presents recent developments and advances, firstly, in corpus-oriented grammar research with a special focus on Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages and, secondly, in corpus linguistic methodology as well as the application of corpus methods to grammar-related fields. The volume results from the sixth international conference Grammar and Corpora (GaC 2016), which took place at the Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, Germany, in November 2016