Harmonised large-scale syntactic/semantic lexicons: a European multilingual infrastructure

The paper aims at providing an overview of the situation of Language Resources (LR) in Europe, in particular as emerging from a few European projects regarding the construction of large-scale harmonised resources to be used for many applicative purpose, also of multilingual nature. An important research aspect of the projects is given by the very fact that the large enterprise described is, at our knowledge, the first attempt at developing wide-coverage lexicons for so many languages (12 European languages), with a harmonised common model, and with encoding of structured "semantic types" and semantic (subcategorisation) frames on a large scale. Reaching a common agreed model grounded on sound theoretical approaches within a very large consortium is in itself a challenging task. The actual lexicons will then provide a framework for testing and evaluating the maturity of the current state-of-the-art in lexical semantics grounded on, and connected to. a syntactic foundation. Another research aspect is provided by the recognition of the necessity of accompanying these "static" lexicons with dynamic means of acquiring lexical information from large corpora. This is one of the challenging research aspects for the next years of a global strategy for building a large and useful multilingual LR infrastructure.