We present the Database of Catalan Adjectives (DCA), a database with 2,296 adjective lemmata enriched with morphological, syntactic and semantic information. This set of adjectives has been collected from a fragment of the Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans and constitutes a representative sample of the adjective class in Catalan as a whole. T...

Complex phrases are also brought into the categorization, so that cutlery that is in the drawer and hot water are mass phrases while tree that is in the park and tall person are count phrases. I use ‘mass term’ and ‘count term’ to cover both nouns and more complex noun phrases. (As well, some theorists admit other grammatical categories into the count/mass realm: some verb phrases and some adje...

In this paper, we present an approach for automatically creating a combinatory categorial grammar (CCG) treebank from a dependency treebank for the subject–object–verb language Hindi. Rather than a direct conversion from dependency trees to CCG trees, we propose a two stage approach: a language independent generic algorithm first extracts a CCG lexicon from the dependency treebank. An exhaustiv...

Lexical compounds in English are constrained in that the non-head noun can be an irregular but not a regular plural (e.g. mice eater vs. *rats eater), a contrast that has been argued to derive from a morphological constraint on modifiers inside compounds. In addition, bare nouns are preferred over plural forms inside compounds (e.g. mouse eater vs. mice eater), a contrast that has been ascribed...

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) have gained a reputation for beating state-of-the-art results on many NLP benchmarks and for learning representations of words and larger linguistic units that encode complex syntactic and semantic structures. However, it is not straight-forward to understand how exactly these models make their decisions. Recently Li et al. (2015) developed methods to provide lin...

Phrase re-ordering is a well-known obstacle to robust machine translation for language pairs with significantly different word orderings. For Arabic-English, two languages that usually differ in the ordering of subject and verb, the subject and its modifiers must be accurately moved to produce a grammatical translation. This operation requires more than base phrase chunking and often defies cur...

Nominal reference is very flexible—the same object may be called a dalmatian, a dog, or an animal when all are literally true. What accounts for the choices that speakers make in how they refer to objects? The addition of modifiers (e.g. big dog) has been extensively explored in the literature, but fewer studies have explored the choice of noun, including its level of abstraction. We collected ...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of Ezafe recognition in Persian language. Ezafe is an unstressed vowel that is usually not written, but is intelligently recognized and pronounced by human. Ezafe marker can be placed into noun phrases, adjective phrases and some prepositional phrases linking the head and modifiers. Ezafe recognition in Persian is indeed a homograph disambiguation probl...

A number of different formal analyses of relative clauses have been proposed over the years. For example, the adjunction analysis states that the relative clause is adjoined to the modified noun; the antisymmetry analysis (formulated in Kayne 1994) posits that the complementizer phrase (CP) is the direct complement of the determiner (the determiner being the head of the nominal projection), and...

This paper describes an effort to build a corpus of full-text journal articles in which every co-referring noun phrase is annotated. The identity and appositive relations were marked up. Several annotation schemas were evaluated and are described here; the OntoNotes guidelines were selected. Biomedical journal articles required a number of adaptations to the OntoNotes guidelines—mainly doing aw...