Extending the coverage of a MWE database for Persian CPs exploiting valency alternations

PersPred is a manually elaborated multilingual syntactic and semantic Lexicon for Persian Complex Predicates (CPs), referred to also as “Light Verb Constructions” (LVCs) or “Compound Verbs”. CPs constitutes the regular and the most common way of expressing verbal concepts in Persian, which has only around 200 simplex verbs. CPs can be defined as multi-word sequences formed by a verb and a non-verbal element and functioning in many respects as a simplex verb. Bonami & Samvelain (2010) and Samvelian & Faghiri (to appear) extendedly argue that Persian CPs are MWEs and consequently must be listed. The first delivery of PersPred, contains more than 600 combinations of the verb zadan ‘hit’ with a noun, presented in a spreadsheet. In this paper we present a semi-automatic method used to extend the coverage of PersPred 1.0, which relies on the syntactic information on valency alternations already encoded in the database. Given the importance of CPs in the verbal lexicon of Persian and the fact that lexical resources cruelly lack for Persian, this method can be further used to achieve our goal of making PersPred an appropriate resource for NLP applications.