Proceedings - Österreichische Gesellschaft für Artificial Intelligence

Preface
Lexical-semantic contents serve as valuable sources of linguistic information for research and
applications in natural language processing. Recent years have seen different kinds of efforts to
enhance the usability of these resources. Successful attempts to integrate and merge lexical resources
have led not only to the mapping of lexical databases of the WordNet and FrameNet type but also to
the creation of online dictionary networks of different sorts. Enhancing usability also means to
provide data for the human user by new sophisticated access interfaces as well as to make these data
available for different kinds of NLP applications. In addition, with the increase of statistical methods
in linguistics, these resources have also become more and more interesting for various research
issues. The methods to achieve this rise in functionality and usability of lexical resources is a major
topic of the workshop.
The workshop was conceived as a forum for discussing recent developments and applications of
various kinds of lexical-semantic resources including WordNets, ontologies, FrameNets, electronic
dictionaries, internet lexicons, and other collaboratively built lexical semantic resources. It was a
follow-up to a series of thematically related events: GSCL workshops in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, and
a DGfS workshop in 2006.
The six papers presented at the workshop focus partly on the creation of new lexical resources and
partly on applications in language processing that are connected to lexical resources.
Godoy and colleagues report on the construction of a lexical resource of Brazilian Portuguese verbs.
Based on Levin’s hypothesis on the dependency of a verb’s argument structure on the semantic class
it belongs to, the authors supply verbs with predicate decompositions which in turn define semantic
verb classes. The decompositions are linked to syntactic structures exemplified by example
sentences. The resulting resource will be available in printed form as well as a lexical database.
Klyueva’s paper focuses on the detection of dissimilarities between Czech and Russian verb
valencies. Building on two existing resources, a Czech-Russian bilingual dictionary and a Czech
valency dictionary, she explores how far verb semantics and semantic class membership might
account for the differences. The study will result in a digital lexical resource that contains those verb
pairs in Czech and Russian that differ in their valency frames. This resource is supposed to support
applications in automatic language processing such as machine translation.
The paper by Lyngfelt and colleagues presents the development of a constructicon for Swedish as
part of the Swedish FrameNet. Based on principles of Construction Grammar, it contains partially
schematic multi-word units. The constructicon can be used as a lexicographic resource per se, is
supposed to support language technology applications (e.g., facilitation of automatic syntactic
analysis), and shall stimulate L2 acquisition research. The resources described in this paper are the
result of activities carried out within Språkbanken, the national center for research on Swedish
language resources at the University of Gothenburg.
Pado and Utt present ongoing work on the creation of a Distributed Memory resource for German,
aiming at the determination of lexical meaning from the word’s distributional behavior in corpora.
Based on a German web-corpus, the study follows Baroni and Lenci’s original proposal (dealing with
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