Recognizing the vocabulary of Brazilian popular newspapers with a free-access computational dictionary

We report an experiment to check the identification of a set of words in popular written Portuguese with two versions of a computational dictionary of Brazilian Portuguese, DELAF PB 2004 and DELAF PB 2015. This dictionary is freely available for use in linguistic analyses of Brazilian Portuguese and other researches, which justifies critical study. The vocabulary comes from the PorPopular corpus, made of popular newspapers Di{\'a}rio Ga{\'u}cho (DG) and Massa! (MA). From DG, we retained a set of texts with 984.465 words (tokens), published in 2008, with the spelling used before the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement adopted in 2009. From MA, we examined papers of 2012, 2014 e 2015, with 215.776 words (tokens), all with the new spelling. The checking involved: a) generating lists of words (types) occurring in DG and MA; b) comparing them with the entry lists of both versions of DELAF PB; c) assessing the coverage of this vocabulary; d) proposing ways of incorporating the items not covered. The results of the work show that an average of 19% of the types in DG were not found in DELAF PB 2004 or 2015. In MA, this average is 13%. Switching versions of the dictionary affected slightly the performance in recognizing the words.

Intégration des données d'un lexique syntaxique dans un analyseur syntaxique probabiliste

This article reports the evaluation of the integration of data from a syntactic-semantic lexicon, the Lexicon-Grammar of French, into a syntactic parser. We show that by changing the set of labels for verbs and predicational nouns, we can improve the performance on French of a non-lexicalized probabilistic parser.

Syntactic variation of support verb constructions

We report experiments about the syntactic variations of support verb constructions, a special type of multiword expressions (MWEs) containing predicative nouns. In these expressions, the noun can occur with or without the verb, with no clear-cut semantic difference. We extracted from a large French corpus a set of examples of the two situations and derived statistical results from these data. The extraction involved large-coverage language resources and finite-state techniques. The results show that, most frequently, predicative nouns occur without a support verb. This fact has consequences on methods of extracting or recognising MWEs.

Outilex, plate-forme logicielle de traitement de textes écrits

The Outilex software platform, which will be made available to research, development and industry, comprises software components implementing all the fundamental operations of written text processing: processing without lexicons, exploitation of lexicons and grammars, language resource management. All data are structured in XML formats, and also in more compact formats, either readable or binary, whenever necessary; the required format converters are included in the platform; the grammar formats allow for combining statistical approaches with resource-based approaches. Manually constructed lexicons for French and English, originating from the LADL, and of substantial coverage, will be distributed with the platform under LGPL-LR license.

Very strict selectional restrictions

We discuss the characteristics and behaviour of two parallel classes of verbs in two Romance languages, French and Portuguese. Examples of these verbs are Port. abater [gado] and Fr. abattre [b\'etail], both meaning "slaughter [cattle]". In both languages, the definition of the class of verbs includes several features: - They have only one essential complement, which is a direct object. - The nominal distribution of the complement is very limited, i.e., few nouns can be selected as head nouns of the complement. However, this selection is not restricted to a single noun, as would be the case for verbal idioms such as Fr. monter la garde "mount guard". - We excluded from the class constructions which are reductions of more complex constructions, e.g. Port. afinar [instrumento] com "tune [instrument] with".

Evaluation of a Grammar of French Determiners

Existing syntactic grammars of natural languages, even with a far from complete coverage, are complex objects. Assessments of the quality of parts of such grammars are useful for the validation of their construction. We evaluated the quality of a grammar of French determiners that takes the form of a recursive transition network. The result of the application of this local grammar gives deeper syntactic information than chunking or information available in treebanks. We performed the evaluation by comparison with a corpus independently annotated with information on determiners. We obtained 86% precision and 92% recall on text not tagged for parts of speech.

Graphes paramétrés et outils de lexicalisation

Shifting to a lexicalized grammar reduces the number of parsing errors and improves application results. However, such an operation affects a syntactic parser in all its aspects. One of our research objectives is to design a realistic model for grammar lexicalization. We carried out experiments for which we used a grammar with a very simple content and formalism, and a very informative syntactic lexicon, the lexicon-grammar of French elaborated by the LADL. Lexicalization was performed by applying the parameterized-graph approach. Our results tend to show that most information in the lexicon-grammar can be transferred into a grammar and exploited successfully for the syntactic parsing of sentences.

A resource-based Korean morphological annotation system

We describe a resource-based method of morphological annotation of written Korean text. Korean is an agglutinative language. The output of our system is a graph of morphemes annotated with accurate linguistic information. The language resources used by the system can be easily updated, which allows us-ers to control the evolution of the per-formances of the system. We show that morphological annotation of Korean text can be performed directly with a lexicon of words and without morpho-logical rules.

In memoriam Maurice Gross

Maurice Gross (1934-2001) was both a great linguist and a pioneer in natural language processing. This article is written in homage to his memory

Lexicon management and standard formats

International standards for lexicon formats are in preparation. To a certain extent, the proposed formats converge with prior results of standardization projects. However, their adequacy for (i) lexicon management and (ii) lexicon-driven applications have been little debated in the past, nor are they as a part of the present standardization effort. We examine these issues. IGM has developed XML formats compatible with the emerging international standards, and we report experimental results on large-coverage lexica.