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Building a Bilingual ValLex Using Treebank Token Alignment: First Observations

We explore the potential and limitations of a concept of building a bilingual valency lexicon based on the alignment of nodes in a parallel treebank. Our aim is to build an electronic Czech->English Valency Lexicon by collecting equivalences from bilingual treebank data and storing them in two already existing electronic valency lexicons, PDT-VALLEX and Engvallex. For this task a special annotation interface has been built upon the TrEd editor, allowing quick and easy collecting of frame equivalences in either of the source lexicons. The issues encountered so far include limitations of technical character, theory-dependent limitations and limitations concerning the achievable degree of quality of human annotation. The issues of special interest for both linguists and MT specialists involved in the project include linguistically motivated non-balance between the frame equivalents, either in number or in type of valency participants. The first phases of annotation so far attest the assumption that there is a unique correspondence between the functors of the translation-equivalent frames. Also, hardly any linguistically significant non-balance between the frames has been found, which is partly promising considering the linguistic theory used and partly caused by little stylistic variety of the annotated corpus texts.