From PropBank to EngValLex: Adapting the PropBank-Lexicon to the Valency Theory of the Functional Generative Description
Abstract
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-Lex