Towards a Semi-Automatic Detection of Reflexive and Reciprocal Constructions and Their Representation in a Valency Lexicon
Abstract: Valency lexicons usually describe valency behavior of verbs in non-reflexive and non-reciprocal constructions. However, reflexive and
reciprocal constructions are common morphosyntactic forms of verbs. Both of these constructions are characterized by regular changes
in morphosyntactic properties of verbs, thus they can be described by grammatical rules. On the other hand, the possibility to create
reflexive and/or reciprocal constructions cannot be trivially derived from the morphosyntactic structure of verbs as it is conditioned
by their semantic properties as well. A large-coverage valency lexicon allowing for rule based generation of all well formed verb
constructions should thus integrate the information on reflexivity and reciprocity. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic procedure,
based on grammatical constraints on reflexivity and reciprocity, detecting those verbs that form reflexive and reciprocal constructions
in corpus data. However, exploitation of corpus data for this purpose is complicated due to the diverse functions of reflexive markers
crossing the domain of reflexivity and reciprocity. The list of verbs identified by the previous procedure is thus further used in an
automatic experiment, applying word embeddings for detecting semantically similar verbs. These candidate verbs have been manually
verified and annotation of their reflexive and reciprocal constructions has been integrated into the valency lexicon of Czech verbs
VALLEX.
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