Subcat-LMF: Fleshing out a standardized format for subcategorization frame interoperability

Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 550–560, Avignon, France, April 23 - 27 2012. c⃝2012 Association for Computational Linguistics Subcat-LMF: Fleshing out a standardized format for subcategorization frame interoperability Judith Eckle-Kohler‡ and Iryna Gurevych†‡ † Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-DIPF) German Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information ‡ Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-TUDA) Department of Computer Science Technische Universit¨at Darmstadt http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de Abstract This paper describes Subcat-LMF, an ISO- LMF compliant lexicon representation for- mat featuring a uniform representation of subcategorization frames (SCFs) for the two languages English and German. Subcat-LMF is able to represent SCFs at a very fine-grained level. We utilized Subcat- LMF to standardize lexicons with large- scale SCF information: the English Verb- Net and two German lexicons, i.e., a subset of IMSlex and GermaNet verbs. To evalu- ate our LMF-model, we performed a cross- lingual comparison of SCF coverage and overlap for the standardized versions of the English and German lexicons. The Subcat- LMF DTD, the conversion tools and the standardized versions of VerbNet and IMS- lex subset are publicly available.1 1 Introduction Computational lexicons providing accurate lexical-syntactic information, such as subcatego- rization frames (SCFs) are vital for many NLP applications involving parsing and word sense disambiguation. In parsing, SCFs have been successfully used to improve the output of sta- tistical parsers (Klenner (2007), Deoskar (2008), Sigogne et al. (2011)) which is particularly significant in high-precision domain-independent parsing. In word sense disambiguation, SCFs have been identified as important features for verb sense disambiguation (Brown et al., 2011), which is due to the correlation of verb senses and SCFs (Andrew et al., 2004). SCFs specify syntactic arguments of verbs and other predicate-like lexemes, e.g. the verb say 1http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/data/uby takes two arguments that can be realized, for in- stance, as noun phrase and that-clause as in He says that the window is open. Although a number of freely available, large- scale and accurate SCF lexicons exist, e.g. COM- LEX (Grishman et al., 1994), VerbNet (Kipper et al., 2008) for English, availability and limita- tions in size and coverage remain an inherent is- sue. This applies even more to languages other than English. One particular approach to address this issue is the combination and integration of existing man- ually built SCF lexicons. Lexicon integration has widely been adopted for increasing the cover- age of lexicons regarding lexical-semantic infor- mation types, such as semantic roles, selectional restrictions, and word senses (e.g., Shi and Mi- halcea (2005), the Semlink project2, Navigli and Ponzetto (2010), Niemann and Gurevych (2011), Meyer and Gurevych (2011)). Currently, SCFs are represented idiosyncrati- cally in existing SCF lexicons. However, inte- gration of SCFs requires a common, interopera- ble representation format. Monolingual SCF in- tegration based on a common representation for- mat has already been addressed by King and Crouch (2005) and just recently by Necsulescu et al. (2011) and Padr´o et al. (2011). However, nei- ther King and Crouch (2005) nor Necsulescu et al. (2011) or Padr´o …

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