Querying multilevel annotation and alignment for detecting grammatical valence divergencies

The valence concept has been used in machine translation as well as didactics on order to build up valence dictionaries for the respective uses. Most valence dictionaries have been built up manually, but given the growing number of parallel resources, it would be desirable to automatically exploit them as basis for building up bilingual valence dictionaries. The present contribution reports on a pilot study on a German-English parallel corpus. In this study, patterns of verb plus grammatical functions were extracted from parallel sentences. The paper reports on some of the basic findings of this extraction, regarding divergencies both in valence patterns as well as syntactic realisations of the predicate, i.e. the verb. These findings set the agenda for further research, which should focus on how to detect semantic shifts of valence carriers in translation and how this affects valence.