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A Preliminary Study for Building the Basque PropBank

This paper presents a methodology for adding a layer of semantic annotation to a syntactically annotated corpus of Basque (EPEC), in terms of semantic roles. The proposal we make here is the combination of three resources: the model used in the PropBank project (Palmer et al., 2005), an in-house database with syntactic/semantic subcategorization frames for Basque verbs (Aldezabal, 2004) and the Basque dependency treebank (Aduriz et al., 2003). In order to validate the methodology and to confirm whether the PropBank model is suitable for Basque and our treebank design, we have built lexical entries and labelled all argument and adjuncts occurring in our treebank for 3 Basque verbs. The result of this study has been very positive, and has produced a methodology adapted to the characteristics of the language and the Basque dependency treebank. Another goal of this study was to study whether semi-automatic tagging was possible. The idea is to present the human taggers a pre-tagged version of the corpus. We have seen that many arguments could be automatically tagged with high precision, given only the verbal entries for the verbs and a handful of examples.