Catherine Macleod

Comlex Syntax: building a computational lexicon

We describe the design of Comlex Syntax, a computational lexicon providing detailed syntactic information for approximately 38,000 English headwords. We consider the types of errors which arise in creating such a lexicon, and how such errors can be measured and controlled.

New York University: description of the PROTEUS system as used for MUC-3

The Proteus system which we have used for MUC-5 is largely unchanged from that used for MUC-3 and MUC-4. It has three main components: a syntactic analyzer, a semantic analyzer, and a template generator.

NP-external arguments a study of argument sharing in English

We explore some predicate-argument-structure phenomena in the context of the NomBank annotation project for English. Support verbs ( They completed the acquisition), transparent nouns ( His first batch of questions), prepositions (At Marys request, John left the room ) and other lexical items can link arguments of a noun N to positions outside of the NP headed by N. In these examples, They is an argument of acquisition, His is an argument of questions and John left the room is an argument of request. In most cases, these NP-external arguments are linked to a multiword expression (MWE) consisting of the noun predicate and (at least) one other item: a support verb, transparent noun, preposition, etc. This paper discusses properties of these constructions and how they interact. For example, in Disney made dozens of attempts to acquire Apple, Disney is an argument of acquire, due to linking properties of the support construction make + attempt and the quantificational noun dozens.

The Comlex Syntax project: the first year

We describe the design of Comlex Syntax, a computational lexicon providing detailed syntactic information for approximately 38,000 English headwords. We consider the types of errors which arise in creating such a lexicon, and how such errors can be measured and controlled.

COMLEX Syntax A Large Syntactic Dictionary for Natural Language Processing

This article is a detailed account of COMLEX Syntax, an on-line syntactic dictionary of English, developed by the Proteus Project at New York University under the auspices of the Linguistics Data Consortium. This lexicon was intended to be used for a variety of tasks in natural language processing by computer and as such has very detailed classes with a large number of syntactic features and complements for the major parts of speech and is, as far as possible, theory neutral. The dictionary was entered by hand with reference to hard copy dictionaries, an on-line concordance and native speakers‘intuition. Thus it is without prior encumbrances and can be used for both pure research and commercial purposes.

The influence of tagging on the classification of lexical complements

A large corpus (about 100 MB of text) was selected and examples of 750 frequently occurring verbs were tagged with their complement class as defined by a large computational syntactic dictionary, COMLEX Syntax. This tagging task led to the refinement of already existing classes and to the addition of classes that had previously not been defined. This has resulted in the enrichment and improvement of the original COMLEX Syntax dictionary. Tagging also provides statistical data which will allow users to select more common complements of a particular verb and ignore rare usage. We discuss below some of the problems encountered in tagging and their resolution.