Practical and Efficient Organization of a Large Valency Dictionary

This paper describes the design and ongoing construction of a large bilingual valency dictionary. The first half describes the existing dictionary of 16,000 Japanese-English patterns, how it was built, how it is used, and points out some shortcomings. The second half introduces three proposals, originally put forward by Somers (1987) to improve the dictionary by separating the complement/adjunct distinction from the use of case-roles, organizing the case roles in a grid, and making the English and Japanese Lexicons separate entities, linked by informative links.