DeQue: A Lexicon of Complex Prepositions and Conjunctions in French

We introduce DeQue, a lexicon covering French complex prepositions (CPRE) like à partir de (from) and complex conjunctions (CCONJ) like bien que (although). The lexicon includes fine-grained linguistic description based on empirical evidence. We describe the general characteristics of CPRE and CCONJ in French, with special focus on syntactic ambiguity. Then, we list the selection criteria used to build the lexicon and the corpus-based methodology employed to collect entries. Finally, we quantify the ambiguity of each construction by annotating around 100 sentences randomly taken from the FRWaC. In addition to its theoretical value, the resource has many potential practical applications. We intend to employ DeQue for treebank annotation and to train a dependency parser that takes complex constructions into account.