We present NomVallex, a manually annotated valency lexicon of Czech nouns and adjectives. The lexicon is created in the theoretical framework of the Functional Generative Description and based on corpus data. In total, NomVallex 2.0 is comprised of 1027 lexical units contained in 570 lexemes, covering the following part-of-speech and derivational categories: deverbal and deadjectival nouns, and deverbal, denominal, deadjectival and primary adjectives. Valency properties of a lexical unit are captured in a valency frame which is modeled as a sequence of valency slots, supplemented with a list of morphemic forms. In order to make it possible to study the relationship between valency behavior of base words and their derivatives, lexical units of nouns and adjectives in NomVallex are linked to their respective base words, contained either in NomVallex itself or, in case of verbs, in a valency lexicon of Czech verbs called VALLEX. NomVallex enables a comparison of valency properties of a significant number of Czech nominals with their base words, both manually and in an automatic way; as such, we can address the theoretical question of argument inheritance, concentrating on systemic and non-systemic valency behavior.

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.

PyVallex is a Python-based system for presenting, searching/filtering, editing/extending and automatic processing of machine-readable lexicon data originally available in a text-based format. The system consists of several components: a parser for the specific lexicon format used in several valency lexicons, a data-validation framework, a regular expression based search engine, a map-reduce style framework for querying the lexicon data and a web-based interface integrating complex search and some basic editing capabilities. PyVallex provides most of the typical functionalities of a Dictionary Writing System (DWS), such as multiple presentation modes for the underlying lexical database, automatic evaluation of consistency tests, and a mechanism of merging updates coming from multiple sources. The editing functionality is currently limited to the client-side interface and edits of existing lexical entries, but additional script-based operations on the database are also possible. The code is published under the open source MIT license and is also available in the form of a Python module for integrating into other software.

We present VPS-GradeUp ― a set of 11,400 graded human decisions on usage patterns of 29 English lexical verbs from the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs by Patrick Hanks. The annotation contains, for each verb lemma, a batch of 50 concordances with the given lemma as KWIC, and for each of these concordances we provide a graded human decision on how well the individual PDEV patterns for this particular lemma illustrate the given concordance, indicated on a 7-point Likert scale for each PDEV pattern. With our annotation, we were pursuing a pilot investigation of the foundations of human clustering and disambiguation decisions with respect to usage patterns of verbs in context. The data set is publicly available at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-1585.

We present a pilot analysis of a new linguistic resource, VPS-GradeUp (available at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-1585). The resource contains 11,400 graded human decisions on usage patterns of 29 English lexical verbs, randomly selected from the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (Hanks, 2000 2014) based on their frequency and the number of senses their lemmas have in PDEV. This data set has been created to observe the interannotator agreement on PDEV patterns produced using the Corpus Pattern Analysis (Hanks, 2013). Apart from the graded decisions, the data set also contains traditional Word-Sense-Disambiguation (WSD) labels. We analyze the associations between the graded annotation and WSD annotation. The results of the respective annotations do not correlate with the size of the usage pattern inventory for the respective verbs lemmas, which makes the data set worth further linguistic analysis.

Valency lexicons typically describe only unmarked usages of verbs (the active form); however, verbs prototypically enter different surface structures. In this paper, we focus on the so-called diatheses, i.e., the relations between different surface syntactic manifestations of verbs that are brought about by changes in the morphological category of voice, e.g., the passive diathesis. The change in voice of a verb is prototypically associated with shifts of some of its valency complementations in the surface structure. These shifts are implied by changes in morphemic forms of the involved valency complementations and are regular enough to be captured by syntactic rules. However, as diatheses are lexically conditioned, their applicability to an individual lexical unit of a verb is not predictable from its valency frame alone. In this work, we propose a representation of this linguistic phenomenon in a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, VALLEX, with the aim to enhance this lexicon with the information on individual types of Czech diatheses. In order to reduce the amount of necessary manual annotation, a semi-automatic method is developed. This method draws evidence from a large morphologically annotated corpus, relying on grammatical constraints on the applicability of individual types of diatheses.