The Computational Lexical Semantics of Syntagmatic Relations

In this paper, we address the issue of syntagmatic expressions from a computational lexical semantic perspective. From a representational viewpoint, we argue for a hybrid approach combining linguistic and conceptual paradigms, in order to account for the continuum we find in natural languages from free combining words to frozen expressions. In particular, we focus on the place of lexical and semantic restricted co-occurrences. From a t)rocessing viewpoint, we show how to generate/analyze syntagmatic expressions by using an efficient constraintbased processor, well fitted for a knowledge-driven approach. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n You can take advantage of the chambermaid I is not a collocation one would like to generate in the context of a hotel to mean "use the services of." This is why collocations should constitute an important part in the design of Machine Translation or Multilingual Generation systems. In this paper, we address the issue of syntagmatic expressions from a computational lexical semantic perspective. From a representational viewpoint, we argue for a hybrid approach combining linguistic and conceptual paradigms, in order to account for the continuum we find in natural languages from free combining words to frozen expressions (such as in idioms kick the (proverbial) bucket). In particular, we focus on the representation of restricted semantic and lexical co-occurrences, such as heavy smoker and professor ... students respectively, that we define later. From a processing viewpoint, we show how to generate/analyze syntagmatic expressions by using an efficient constraint-based processor, well fitted for a knowledge-driven approach. In the following, we first compare different approaches to collocations. Second, we present our approach in terms of representation and processing. Finally, we show how to facilitate the acquisition of co-occurrences by using 1) the formalisnr of lexical rules (LRs), 2) an 1Lederer, R. 1990. Anguished English A Laurel Book, Dell Publishing. inheritance hierarchy of Lexical Semantic Functions (LSFs). 2 A p p r o a c h e s t o S y n t a g m a t i c