Building the Valency Lexicon of Arabic Verbs Viktor Bielický Otakar Smrž LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco

“Valency” potential of a lexical unit, esp. verb, to bind some other specific syntactic element(s)‏ valency information is lexicalized – unpredictable by grammatical rules valency behavior of a verb has to be stated explicitly in a lexicon a linguistic task – to create a valency lexicon of the most frequent Arabic verbs reusable by both humans and computational systems

Theoretical framework valency theory in Functional Generative Description (FGD) – a multi-stratal dependency-oriented description – elaborated on Czech inspiration – VALLEX and PDT-Vallex for Czech resources – Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank (PADT), Corpus Linguae Arabicae (CLARA), Arabic Gigaword, Arabic-Czech dictionary, printed dictionaries valency associated with the underlying tectogrammatical layer of language representation – it describes meaning valency information defined by the valency frame – filled by various types of valency complements described by functors

Types of complements (1) inner participants (actants) – ACTor, PATient, ADDRessee, ORIGin, EFFect (2) free modifications (adjuncts) – e.g. time, location, direction, manner, aim, cause… obligatory vs. optional complements – decided by the dialog test

Complements ACT, PAT, ORIG, EFF

Structured frame ACT, PAT, ORIG, EFF

shifting of cognitive roles – application of primarily syntactic criteria for assigning the first two inner participants (ACT, PAT) – semantic criteria for the remaining inner participants and all free modifications shifting: ACT ← PAT ← EFF/ADDR/ORIG Functional Generative Description

The shift of EFF to PAT

Problems and solutions problem: distinguishing between an inner participant and some free modification solution: criterion of the priority of verbal government (direct transitivity) affecting case inflection in the direct object (the accusative case) → inner participant; surface morphemic realization with a preposition → free modification

Inner participant vs. free modification

Problems and solutions II problem: (i) literal, (ii) figurative, and (iii) idiomatic meanings of a verb – emphasis on consistency solution: for all these meanings separate valency frames are distinguished (with possible surface morphemic variants)

Valency of verbonominal derivatives a participle (active and passive) and a verbal noun ( ) preserve some valency properties of the original verb valency frame of verb - ACT, PAT, ORIG verbal noun can preserve all valency slots – active participle – ACT is absorbed –

Information stored in the valency lexicon lexeme – represented by a lemma (citation form)‏ lexical unit – particular meaning of a given verb described by its valency frame valency frame – sequence of frame slots containing both obligatory and optional inner participants and only obligatory free modifications (adjuncts) and providing information about their surface morphemic representation (a case, a particular preposition)‏ diathesis – possible passivisation of a verb additional information – morphological information, glosses, examples from corpora, frequency and rank of occurrence, syntactic-semantic verb class, etc.

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Comlements ACT, PAT, TWHEN

Complements ACT, PAT, ADDR

Complements ACT, DIR1, DIR3

Figurative meaning of verb → one meaning, one frame (with morphemic variants)

Idiomatic meaning → a separate frame e.g. one particular meaning of verb “to set one’s hopes to”