Automatic Generation of a Lexical Resource to support Semantic Role Labeling in Portuguese

This paper reports an approach to automatically generate a lexical resource to support incremental semantic role labeling annotation in Portuguese. The data come from the corpus Propbank-Br (Propbank of Brazilian Portuguese) and from the lexical resource of English Propbank, as both share the same structure. In order to enable the strategy, we added extra annotation to Propbank-Br. This approach is part of a previous decision to invert the process of implementing a Propbank project, by first annotating a core corpus and only then generating a lexical resource to enable further annotation tasks. The reasoning behind such inversion is to explore the task empirically before distributing the annotation task and to provide simultaneously: 1) a first training corpus for SRL in Brazilian Portuguese and 2) annotated examples to compose a lexical resource to support SRL. The main contribution of this paper is to point out to what extent linguistic effort may be reduced, thereby speeding up the construction of a lexical resource to support SRL for less resourced languages. The corpus Propbank-Br, with the extra annotation described herein, is publicly available.