Latin Vallex. A Treebank-based Semantic Valency Lexicon for Latin

Latin Vallex. A Treebank-based Semantic Valency Lexicon for Latin Marco Passarotti, Berta González Saavedra, Christophe Onambele CIRCSE Research Centre Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Largo Gemelli, 1 – 20123 Milan, Italy E-mail: {marco.passarotti, berta.gonzalezsaavedra, christophe.onambele}@unicatt.it Abstract Despite a centuries-long tradition in lexicography, Latin lacks state-of-the-art computational lexical resources. This situation is strictly related to the still quite limited amount of linguistically annotated textual data for Latin, which can help the building of new lexical resources by supporting them with empirical evidence. However, projects for creating new language resources for Latin have been launched over the last decade to fill this gap. In this paper, we present Latin Vallex, a valency lexicon for Latin built in mutual connection with the semantic and pragmatic annotation of two Latin treebanks featuring texts of different eras. On the one hand, such a connection between the empirical evidence provided by the treebanks and the lexicon allows to enhance each frame entry in the lexicon with its frequency in real data. On the other hand, each valency-capable word in the treebanks is linked to a frame entry in the lexicon. Keywords: valency, Latin, lexicography 1 Introduction Despite a centuries-long tradition in lexicography, Latin lacks state-of-the-art computational lexical resources. This situation is strictly related to the still quite limited amount of linguistically annotated textual data for Latin, which can help the building of new lexical resources by supporting them with empirical evidence. However, projects for creating dependency treebanks for Latin have been launched over the last decade, as well as for creating fundamental lexical resources, like the (still very small) Latin WordNet (Minozzi, 2010). In this paper, we present Latin Vallex, a new lexical resource for Latin consisting in a valency lexicon built in conjunction with the semantic and pragmatic annotation of two Latin treebanks featuring texts of different eras. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the related work on valency lexica. Section 3 describes Latin Vallex, by detailing its structure and explaining the way it is built and how to query the data. Section 4 includes the conclusion and sketches the future work. 2 Related Work. Valency and Lexica The notion of valency is generally defined as the number of obligatory complements required by a word: these are usually named ‘arguments’, while the non-obligatory ones are referred to as ‘adjuncts’. Viewing lexical semantics through the notion of valency is a widespread approach in linguistics. This is strictly related to the basic assumption of frame semantics (Fillmore, 1982), according to which the meaning of some words can be fully understood only by knowing the frame elements that are evoked by that word. Valency lexica for several languages are today available. These lexica play an important role in NLP thanks to their large applicability in tasks like semantic role labeling, word sense disambiguation, automatic verb classification, selectional preference acquisition and also treebanking (Urešová, 2004). Like other language resources, also valency lexica can be built in intuition-based or in corpus-driven fashion according to the role played …

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