Integration of nominal predicates in parser: an experiment in constructions with the support verb ‘give’ in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This paper describes the methodology for the integration of nominal predicates, like support verb constructions (SVC), in XIP parser, which is used by the processing chain for Portuguese named STRING. It presents, more specifically, 580 SVC with the verb ‚give‘, which were manually annotated and then integrated into the rule-based XIP grammar in order to extract the SUPPORT dependency between the predicative noun (Npred) and the support verb (Vsup). It is necessary to analyze automatically SVC because they are different from full verb constructions, they have complex syntactic structures, specific syntactic-semantic properties and they admit systematic syntactic transformations, although lexically determined. The concept of SVC and the lexical-syntactic approach adopted follow the theoretical and methodological principles of Lexicon-Grammar. As a result of integration of such data to the XIP parser, the system achieved 85% precision, 87% recall, and 80% accuracy and 86% F-measure.