From PropBank to EngValLex: Adapting the PropBank-Lexicon to the Valency Theory of the Functional Generative Description
Silvie Cinková · 2006
EngValLex is the name of an FGD-compliant valency lexicon of English verbs, built from the PropBank-Lexicon and following the structure of Vallex, the FGD-based lexicon of Czech verbs.EngValLex is interlinked with the PropBank-Lexicon, thus preserving the original links between the PropBank-Lexicon and the PropBank-Corpus.Therefore it is also supposed to be part of corpus annotation.This paper describes the automatic conversion of the PropBank-Lexicon into Pre-EngValLex, as well as the progress of its subsequent manual refinement (EngValLex).At the start, the Propbank-arguments were automatically re-labeled with functors (semantic labels of FGD) and the PropBank-rolesets were split into the respective example sentences, which became FGD-valency frames of Pre-EngValLex.Human annotators check and correct the labels and make the preliminary valency frames FGD-compliant.The most essential theoretical difference between the original and EngValLex is the syntactic alternations used by the PropBank-Lexicon, not yet employed within the Czech framework.The alternation-based approach substantially affects the conception of the frame, making in very different from the one applied within the FGD-framework.Preserving the valuable alternation information required special linguistic rules for keeping, altering and re-merging the automatically generated preliminary valency frames.