From PropBank to EngValLex: Adapting the PropBank-Lexicon to the Valency Theory of the Functional Generative Description

Abstract

EngValLex is the name of an FGD-compliant valency lexicon of English verbs, built from the PropBank-Lexicon and following the structure of Vallex, the FGD-based lexicon of Czech verbs. EngValLex is interlinked with the PropBank-Lexicon, thus preserving the original links between the PropBank-Lexicon and the PropBank-Corpus. Therefore it is also supposed to be part of corpus annotation. This paper describes the automatic conversion of the PropBank-Lexicon into Pre-EngValLex, as well as the progress of its subsequent manual refinement (EngValLex). At the start, the Propbank-arguments were automatically re-labeled with functors (semantic labels of FGD) and the PropBank-rolesets were split into the respective example sentences, which became FGD-valency frames of Pre-EngValLex. Human annotators check and correct the labels and make the preliminary valency frames FGD-compliant. The most essential theoretical difference between the original and EngValLex is the syntactic alternations used by the PropBank-Lexicon, not yet employed within the Czech framework. The alternation-based approach substantially affects the conception of the frame, making in very different from the one applied within the FGD-framework. Preserving the valuable alternation information required special linguistic rules for keeping, altering and re-merging the automatically generated preliminary valency frames.

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