Looking for French deverbal nouns in an evolving Web (a short history of WAC)

Abstract

International audienceThis paper describes an 8-year-long research effort for automatically collecting new French deverbal nouns on the Web. The goal has remained the same: building an extensive and cumulative list of noun-verb pairs where the noun denotes the action expressed by the verb (e.g. production - produce). This list is used for both linguistic research and for NLP applications. The initial method consisted in taking advantage of the former Altavista search engine, allowing for a direct access to unknown word forms. The second technique led us to develop a specific crawler, which raised a number of technical difficulties. In the third experiment, we use a collection of web pages made available to us by a commercial search engine. Through all these stages, the general method has remained the same, and the results are similar and cumulative, although the technical environment has greatly evolved