Harmonised large-scale syntactic/semantic lexicons: a European multilingual infrastructure

MT Summit VII Sept. 1999 Harmonised large-scale syntactic/semantic lexicons: a European multilingual infrastructure Nicoletta Calzolari Antonio Zampolli Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC) del CNR, Pisa, Italy (ILC) del CNR, Pisa, Italy Abstract The paper aims at providing an overview of the situation of Language Resources (LR) in Europe, in particular as emerging from a few European projects regarding the construction of large-scale harmonised resources to be used for many applicative purpose, also of multilingual nature. An important research aspect of the projects is given by the very fact that the large enterprise described is, at our knowledge, the first attempt at developing wide-coverage lexicons for so many lan- guages (12 European languages), with a har- monised common model, and with encoding of structured "semantic types" and semantic (subcategorisation) frames on a large scale. Reaching a common agreed model grounded on sound theoretical approaches within a very large consortium is in itself a challenging task. The actual lexicons will then provide a framework for testing and evaluating the maturity of the current state-of-the-art in lexical semantics grounded on, and connected to. a syntactic foundation. Another research aspect is provided by the recognition of the necessity of accompanying these "static" lexicons with dynamic means of acquiring lexical information from large corpora. This is one of the challenging research aspects - for the next years - of a global strategy for building a large and useful multilingual LR infrastructure. 1 Introduction The paper aims at providing an overview of the situation of Language Resources (LR) in Europe, in particular as emerging from a few representative European projects regarding the construction and ac- quisition of large-scale harmonised resources to be used for many applicative purpose, also of multilin- gual nature. The structure of the paper is as follows: we provide here in the introduction some historical notes, in section 2 we describe two large projects con- cerning the building of wide coverage syntactic and semantic lexicons: section 3 introduces the distinction between static and dynamic lexicons, which is then exemplified in section 4 with the description of the project SPARKLE; section 5 gives a few conclusive remarks on the European standardised multilingual infrastructure for LR. 1.1 Some historical background "The tendency predominant in the 70's and in the first half of the 80's, to test linguistic hypotheses with small amounts of (allegedly) critical data, rather than to study extensively the variety of linguistic phenomena occurring in communicative contexts" (Godfrey, Zampolli 1997) has certainly contributed to the scarcity of interest, in the same period, of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) sector for the creation and the analysis of large corpora and the construction of extended lexicons. The 1986 Grosseto (Tuscany) Workshop "On auto- mating the lexicon" (Walker et al. 1995) is usually rec- ognised as the event marking an inversion of tendency and the starting point of the process which gradually brought the major actors of the NLP sector to pay more and more attention to reusable language resources. This process, …

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