Towards a Semi-Automatic Detection of Reflexive and Reciprocal Constructions and Their Representation in a Valency Lexicon

Václava Kettnerová, Marketa Lopatkova, Anna Vernerová, Petra Barancikova


Abstract
Valency lexicons usually describe valency behavior of verbs in non-reflexive and non-reciprocal constructions. However, reflexive and reciprocal constructions are common morphosyntactic forms of verbs. Both of these constructions are characterized by regular changes in morphosyntactic properties of verbs, thus they can be described by grammatical rules. On the other hand, the possibility to create reflexive and/or reciprocal constructions cannot be trivially derived from the morphosyntactic structure of verbs as it is conditioned by their semantic properties as well. A large-coverage valency lexicon allowing for rule based generation of all well formed verb constructions should thus integrate the information on reflexivity and reciprocity. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic procedure, based on grammatical constraints on reflexivity and reciprocity, detecting those verbs that form reflexive and reciprocal constructions in corpus data. However, exploitation of corpus data for this purpose is complicated due to the diverse functions of reflexive markers crossing the domain of reflexivity and reciprocity. The list of verbs identified by the previous procedure is thus further used in an automatic experiment, applying word embeddings for detecting semantically similar verbs. These candidate verbs have been manually verified and annotation of their reflexive and reciprocal constructions has been integrated into the valency lexicon of Czech verbs VALLEX.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.384
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3136–3144
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.384
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Václava Kettnerová, Marketa Lopatkova, Anna Vernerová, and Petra Barancikova. 2020. Towards a Semi-Automatic Detection of Reflexive and Reciprocal Constructions and Their Representation in a Valency Lexicon. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3136–3144, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Semi-Automatic Detection of Reflexive and Reciprocal Constructions and Their Representation in a Valency Lexicon (Kettnerová et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.384.pdf