Semantic interpretations of case-suffixes and prepositions

Here you can find an inventory of semantic interpretations for Basque case-suffixes and English and Spanish prepositions given as a list of tags. The inventory is based on Aldezabal’s (forthcoming) description of Basque verbs argument structure and Dorr’s Lexical Conceptual Structures (Dorr, 1993), and uses a unified list of interpretations for all languages.

This multilingual inventory allows to easily find other language equivalents of any given preposition and case-suffix. We have shown in (Agirre et al. 2002) that multilinguality can be used to partially disambiguate semantically Basque case-suffixes.

Basque is an agglutinative language, and its case suffixes are more or less equivalent to prepositions, but are also used to mark the subject and objects of verbs.

This work has been carried out jointly between IXA team, from the University of the Basque Country and CLIP Laboratory of Maryland University.

Contact: jibleaym@si.ehu.es

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References:

Agirre, E., M. Lersundi and D. Martinez (2002), “A multilingual approach to disambiguate prepositions and case suffixes”, Proceedings of the Word Sense Disambiguation: Recent Successes and Future Directions Workshop, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Aldezabal, I. (2004): Aditzaren azpikategorizazioaren azterketa aplikazio konputazionalari begira (Analyzing verbal subcategorization aimed at its computational application). PhD. University of the Basque Country.

Dorr, B. (1993), Machine Translation: A View from the Lexicon, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press

Dorr, Bonnie and Nizar Habash (2002), “Interlingua Approximation: A Generation-Heavy Approach”, AMTA-2002 Interlingua Reliability Workshop, Tiburon, California, USA

Lersundi, M., E. Agirre (2003), “Semantic interpretations of postpositions and prepositions: a multilingual inventory for Basque, English and Spanish” ACL-SIGSEM workshop: The Linguistic Dimensions of Prepositions and their Use in Computational Linguistics Formalisms and Applications. Toulouse, September 2003.