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Annotating the argument structure of deverbal nominalizations in Spanish

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Abstract

Over recent years, there has been a growing interest in the computational treatment of nominalized Noun Phrases due to the rich semantic information they contain. These Noun Phrases can be understood as verbal paraphrases and, just like them, they can also denote argument and thematic-role relations. This paper presents the methodology followed to annotate the argument structure of deverbal nominalizations in the Spanish AnCora-Es corpus. We focus on the automated annotation process that is mostly based on the semantic information specified in a verbal lexicon but also on the syntactic and semantic information annotated in the corpus. The heuristic rules that make use of this information rely on linguistic assumptions that are also evaluated as we evaluate the reliability of the automated process. The automated annotation was manually checked in order to ensure the accuracy of the final resource. We demonstrate its feasibility (77% F-measure) and show that it facilitates corpus annotation, which is always a time-consuming and costly process. The result is the enrichment of the AnCora-Es corpus with the argument structure and thematic roles of deverbal nominalizations. It is the first Spanish corpus with this kind of information that is freely available.

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Notes

  1. Nominalizations are also represented in the different FrameNet projects, which are lexical databases supported by corpus evidence. See Ruppenhofer et al. (2006) for English, Burchardt et al. (2009) for German, Ohara (2009) for Japanese and Subirats (2009) for Spanish.

  2. Deverbal nominalizations are classified in three types depending on the denotation (Peris et al. 2010): event nominalizations (i.e., they refer to an action), result nominalizations (i.e., they refer to the result of an action), and underspecified nominalizations (i.e. when it is not possible to disambiguate between the two denotations above). This information is also annotated in AnCora-Es.

  3. http://verbs.colorado.edu/semlink/.

  4. Peris (2010) AnCora-Nom: annotation guidelines. Work report at http://clic.ub.edu/ca/publicacions.

  5. AnCora-Es is the largest multilayer annotated corpus of Spanish freely available at: http://clic.ub.edu/corpus/ancora.

  6. Our initial idea to detect relational adjectives was to adapt to Spanish the adjective classifier developed by Boleda (2007), but it was not worth the effort and time that we had to put into it.

  7. When translating into English it turns out that the AP corresponding to policial is converted to a NP ‘police’. For this reason, we removed ‘AP’ from the English tag.

  8. When translating into English it turns out that the AP corresponding to empresarial is converted to a NP ‘business’. For this reason, we removed ‘AP’ from the English tag.

  9. In this case, the English translation does not provide an equivalent constituent to the Spanish PP-arg1-pat. We therefore removed that tag from the English translation.

  10. In this case, the English translation does not provide an equivalent constituent to the Spanish PP-arg2-loc. We therefore removed the PP tag from the English translation.

  11. Kappa measure lowers the observed agreement measure discounting the part of agreement due to chance. Kappa have been computed using Scott’s Pi to calculate the agreement by chance probability.

  12. In addition to the observed false positives that support this claim, 90% of false negatives for the arg0-agt tag were arg1-pat, and 70% of false negatives for the arg0-cau tag were arg1-tem. These figures reinforce our observation.

  13. http://www.clips.ua.ac.be/conll2008/.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Horacio Rodríguez and David Bridgewater for their helpful advice. We would also like to express our gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve this article. This work was partly supported by the project Araknion (FFI2010-114774-E) and TEXT-MESS 2.0 (TIN2009-13391-C04-04) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and by a FPU grant (AP2007-01028) from the Spanish Ministry of Education.

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  1. Centre de Llenguatge i Computació, University of Barcelona (CLiC-UB), Barcelona, Spain

    Aina Peris & Mariona Taulé

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  1. Aina Peris
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Correspondence to Aina Peris.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 10.

Table 10 Specific rules involving two or more nominalized constituents
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Peris, A., Taulé, M. Annotating the argument structure of deverbal nominalizations in Spanish. Lang Resources & Evaluation 46, 667–699 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9172-x

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