A Corpus-based Syntactic Lexicon for Adverbs

AbstractA word class often neglected in the field of NLP resources, namely adverbs, has lately been described in a computational lexicon produced at CST as one of the results of a Ph.D.-project. The adverb lexicon, which is integrated in the Danish STO lexicon, gives detailed syntactic information on the type of modification and position, as well as on other syntactic properties of approx 800 Danish adverbs. One of the aims of the lexicon has been to establish a clear distinction between syntactic and semantic information - where other lexicons often generalize over the syntactic behavior of semantic classes of adverbs, every adverb is described with respect to its proper syntactic behavior in a text corpus, revealing very individual syntactic properties. Syntactic information on adverbs is needed in NLP systems generating text to ensure correct placing in the phrase they modify. Also in systems analyzing text, this information is needed in order to attach the adverbs to the right node in the syntactic parse trees. Within the field of linguistic research, several results can be deduced from the lexicon, e.g. knowledge of syntactic classes of Danish adverbs.