Towards Lexical Encoding of Multi-Word Expressions in Spanish Dialects

Towards Lexical Encoding of Multi-Word Expressions in Spanish Dialects Diana Bogantes, Eric Rodr´ıguez, Alejandro Arauco, Alejandro Rodr´ıguez, Agata Savary Universit´e Franc¸ois Rabelais Tours, France agata.savary@univ-tours.fr Abstract This paper describes a pilot study in lexical encoding of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in 4 Latin American dialects of Spanish: Costa Rican, Colombian, Mexican and Peruvian. We describe the variability of MWE usage across dialects. We adapt an existing data model to a dialect-aware encoding, so as to represent dialect-related specificities, while avoiding redundancy of the data common for all dialects. A dozen of linguistic properties of MWEs can be expressed in this model, both on the level of a whole MWE and of its individual components. We describe the resulting lexical resource containing several dozens of MWEs in four dialects and we propose a method for constructing a web corpus as a support for crowdsourcing examples of MWE occurrences. The resource is available under an open license and paves the way towards a large-scale dialect-aware language resource construction, which should prove useful in both traditional and novel NLP applications. Keywords: multi-word expressions, lexical encoding, Spanish dialects 1. Introduction When Natural Language Processing addresses languages such as Spanish, with a very substantial number of native speakers across various countries, the universalism of the corresponding resources and tools is an important challenge due to dialects. Dialects of the same language can vary e.g. in terms of lexicon, inflection, grammar, or meaning, thus, generic NLP solutions may require customization in order to best fit a given dialect. This problem is similar to the one of automatic processing of closely related languages (Ver- tan et al., 2013), where one of the challenges it to benefit from the modeling and encoding effort performed for one language in order to deal with another one. Multi-word expressions (MWEs) such as sin pelos en la lengua lit. (to speak) with no hair in the tongue ’frankly’, colgar los zapatos, lit. to hang shoes ’to die’, or se arm´o la gorda lit. a fat woman was assembled ’a big problem started’, belong to the most intriguing and challenging di- alect specificities. A multi-word expression is understood here as a syntactic structure in which at least two compo- nent words (usually including the head-word) are lexical- ized, i.e. always realized by the same lexeme, and which shows some degree of orthographic, morphological, syntac- tic or semantic idiosyncrasy with respect to what is deemed general grammar rules of the language. In this study we are mostly interested in semantically idiosyncratic expressions, i.e. those whose meaning cannot be compositionally calcu- lated from the meanings of individual components, which is often due to a use of metaphor. We specifically focus on the variability of MWE meaning and use in different di- alects of the same language, here 4 Latin American dialects of Spanish. 2. MWEs in Spanish dialects While lexical encoding and automatic processing of MWEs is an increasingly studied topic (Savary et al., 2015), rel- atively few attention has been payed so far to the …

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