Using Valency Inheritance in Building a Valency Lexicon

Abstract

Derived words often share certain characteristics with their base words, which leads to the idea that identical properties are inherited from the base words. These properties also cover valency. Valency inheritance has not been used to automatically build lexical resources providing information on valency, the manual annotation of which requires significant human effort. In this paper, we propose a procedure for generating valency frames of selected semantic categories of Czech nouns and adjectives exhibiting a significant level of valency inheritance, thus covering the productive and systemic core of the lexicon. Based on a semiautomatic comparison of the noun and adjectival valency frames from NomVallex and the verbal valency frames from VALLEX, rules describing valency changes in the valency frames of noun and adjectival derivatives are formulated. The conditions imposed by the rules on valency frames identify individual base lemmas in these lexicons for which direct noun and adjectival derivatives are searched in DeriNet. Based on the changes in valency determined in the rules, more than 23,000 valency frames assigned to more than 10,000 noun and adjectival derivatives were derived, achieving high accuracy. These valency frames were included in DeriVallex, a database providing a solid basis for extending current lexical resources.

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