DeQue: A Lexicon of Complex Prepositions and Conjunctions in French

DeQue: A Lexicon of Complex Prepositions and Conjunctions in French Carlos Ramisch, Alexis Nasr, André Valli, José Deulofeu Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, LIF UMR 7279 FirstName.LastName@lif.univ-mrs.fr Abstract We introduce DeQue, a lexicon covering French complex prepositions (CPRE) like à partir de (from) and complex conjunctions (CCONJ) like bien que (although). The lexicon includes fine-grained linguistic description based on empirical evidence. We describe the general characteristics of CPRE and CCONJ in French, with special focus on syntactic ambiguity. Then, we list the selection criteria used to build the lexicon and the corpus-based methodology employed to collect entries. Finally, we quantify the ambiguity of each construction by annotating around 100 sentences randomly taken from the FRWaC. In addition to its theoretical value, the resource has many potential practical applications. We intend to employ DeQue for treebank annotation and to train a dependency parser that takes complex constructions into account. Keywords: Compex prepositions, complex conjunctions, multiword expressions, lexicon, French, dependency parsing. 1. Introduction Complex prepositions (CPRE) and complex conjunctions (CCONJ) are two types of function words that consist of more than one orthographic word (Piot, 1993). They can be considered as fixed multiword expressions that allow lit- tle or no variability. Examples in English include CCONJs even though, as well as and CPREs up to and in front of. Examples in French are shown in Table 1 along with their English (EN) meaningful and literal translations. CPRE and CCONJ constructions are quite frequent in French. Their linguistic description in the literature is gen- erally limited to building comprehensive lists of such con- structions (Sagot, 2010). Most authors assume that these constructions allow no or very little variability (inflection, insertion). Therefore, they would not require a very sophis- ticated description and representation in machine-readable lexicons and NLP systems, such as the ones required for verbs, for instance (Dubois and Dubois-Charlier, 2004). An aspect which is often neglected is the segmentation and structural ambiguity that arises when the words composing the complex function word co-occur by pure chance. Con- sider examples 1 and 2 containing the French CCONJ bien que. It is composed by the words bien (well) and que (that), but when they act as a CCONJ they mean although. (1) Je mange bien que je n’aie pas faim I eat although I am not hungry (2) Je pense bien que je n’ai pas faim I think indeed that I am not hungry In example 1, bien que is indeed a CCONJ that opposes the main clause (I eat) and the subordinate clause (I am not hungry). In example 2, however, bien que is not a CCONJ and the two words co-occur by chance. The adverb indeed modifies the verb of the main clause think, while the con- junction that introduces the clausal object. Since the word bien is a very common intensifier in French, such accidental co-occurrence cases are likely to occur with all verbs that accept que-clausal complements like think, say and forget. From an NLP perspective, it is relevant to study …

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