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Lexical description for NLP: The case of the French adverb presque

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Abstract

This paper presents a detailed linguistic (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic) analysis of the French scalar adverb presque; the analysis is performed so as to be computationally relevant. Further, a methodology for describing other closed-class lexical items is suggested. Such descriptions are necessary for the support of natural language processing systems including analyzers, generators and machine translation systems.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut de Recherches Inderdisciplinaires et de le Développements en l'Intelligence Artificielle, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium

    Christine Defrise

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  1. Christine Defrise
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Additional information

This research was supported by the Belgian National Incentive Program for Fundamental Research in Artificial Intelligence, a program initiated by the Belgian government's Office of Science Policy Programming. This paper owes a great deal to the insightful comments of M. Dominicy of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and three referees. Scientific responsibility is of course assumed by the author.

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Defrise, C. Lexical description for NLP: The case of the French adverb presque . Mach Translat 4, 195–232 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00420843

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