Building the Valency Lexicon of Arabic Verbs

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Building the Valency Lexicon of Arabic Verbs

• Viktor Bielický Otakar Smr
• LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco

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Valency

• potential of a lexical unit, esp. verb, to bind
  some other specific syntactic element(s)?
• valency information is lexicalized
  unpredictable by grammatical rules
• valency behavior of a verb has to be stated
  explicitly in a lexicon
• a linguistic task to create a valency lexicon
  of the most frequent Arabic verbs reusable by
  both humans and computational systems

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Theoretical framework

• valency theory in Functional Generative
  Description (FGD) a multi-stratal
  dependency-oriented description elaborated on
  Czech
• inspiration VALLEX and PDT-Vallex for Czech
• resources Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank
  (PADT), Corpus Linguae Arabicae (CLARA), Arabic
  Gigaword, Arabic-Czech dictionary, printed
  dictionaries
• valency associated with the underlying
  tectogrammatical layer of language representation
  it describes meaning
• valency information defined by the valency frame
  filled by various types of valency complements
  described by functors

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Types of complements

• inner participants (actants) ACTor, PATient,
  ADDRessee, ORIGin, EFFect
• free modifications (adjuncts) e.g. time,
  location, direction, manner, aim, cause
• obligatory vs. optional complements decided by
  the dialog test

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Complements ACT, PAT, ORIG, EFF
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Structured frame ACT, PAT, ORIG, EFF
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Functional Generative Description

• shifting of cognitive roles application of
  primarily syntactic criteria for assigning the
  first two inner participants (ACT, PAT)
  semantic criteria for the remaining inner
  participants and all free modifications
• shifting
• ACT ? PAT ? EFF/ADDR/ORIG

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The shift of EFF to PAT
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Problems and solutions

• problem distinguishing between an inner
  participant and some free modification
• solution criterion of the priority of verbal
  government (direct transitivity) affecting case
  inflection in the direct object (the accusative
  case) ? inner participant
• surface morphemic realization with a preposition
  ? free modification

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Inner participant vs. free modification
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Problems and solutions II

• problem (i) literal, (ii) figurative, and (iii)
  idiomatic meanings of a verb emphasis on
  consistency
• solution for all these meanings separate valency
  frames are distinguished (with possible surface
  morphemic variants)

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Valency of verbonominal derivatives

• a participle (active and passive) and a verbal
  noun ( ) preserve some valency properties
  of the original verb
• valency frame of verb - ACT, PAT, ORIG
• verbal noun can preserve all valency slots
• active participle ACT is absorbed

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Information stored in the valency lexicon

• lexeme represented by a lemma (citation form)?
• lexical unit particular meaning of a given verb
  described by its valency frame
• valency frame sequence of frame slots
  containing both obligatory and optional inner
  participants and only obligatory free
  modifications (adjuncts) and providing
  information about their surface morphemic
  representation (a case, a particular
  preposition)?
• diathesis possible passivisation of a verb
• additional information morphological
  information, glosses, examples from corpora,
  frequency and rank of occurrence,
  syntactic-semantic verb class, etc.

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• Thank you!

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Comlements ACT, PAT, TWHEN
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Complements ACT, PAT, ADDR
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Complements ACT, DIR1, DIR3
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Figurative meaning of verb ?one
meaning, one frame (with morphemic variants)
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Idiomatic meaning ? a separate frame

• e.g. one particular meaning of verb
• to set ones hopes to

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