MultiVal - Towards a multilingual valence lexicon

Abstract

MultiVal is a valence lexicon derived from lexicons of computational HPSG grammars for Norwegian, Spanish and Ga (ISO 639-3, gaa), with altogether about 22, 000 verb entries and on average more than 200 valence types defined for each language. These lexical resources are mapped onto a common set of discriminants with a common array of values, and stored in a relational database linked to a web demo and a wiki presentation. Search discriminants are 'syntactic argument structure' (SAS), functional specification, situation type and aspect, for any subset of languages, as well as the verb type systems of the grammars. Search results are lexical entries satisfying the discriminants entered, exposing the specifications from the respective provenance grammars. The Ga grammar lexicon has in turn been converted from a Ga Toolbox lexicon. Aside from the creation of such a multilingual valence resource through converging or converting existing resources, the paper also addresses a tool for the creation of such a resource as part of corpus annotation for less resourced languages.