LexFr: Adapting the LexIt Framework to Build a Corpus-based French Subcategorization Lexicon

Abstract

This paper introduces LexFr, a corpus-based French lexical resource built by adapting the framework LexIt, originally developed to describe the combinatorial potential of Italian predicates. As in the original framework, the behavior of a group of target predicates is characterized by a series of syntactic (i.e., subcategorization frames) and semantic (i.e., selectional preferences) statistical information (a.k.a. distributional profiles) whose extraction process is mostly unsupervised. The first release of LexFr includes information for 2,493 verbs, 7,939 nouns and 2,628 adjectives. In these pages we describe the adaptation process and evaluated the final resource by comparing the information collected for 20 test verbs against the information available in a gold standard dictionary. In the best performing setting, we obtained 0.74 precision, 0.66 recall and 0.70 F-measure.