Towards a Corpus-based Valency Lexicon of Czech Nouns

Corpus-based Valency Lexicon of Czech Nouns is a starting project picking up the threads of our previous work on nominal valency. It builds upon solid theoretical foundations of the theory of valency developed within the Functional Generative Description. In this paper, we describe the ways of treating valency of nouns in a modern corpus-based lexicon, available as machine readable data in a format suitable for NLP applications, and report on the limitations that the most commonly used corpus interfaces provide to the research of nominal valency. The linguistic material is extracted from the Prague Dependency Treebank, the synchronic written part of the Czech National Corpus, and Araneum Bohemicum. We will utilize lexicographic software and partially also data developed for the valency lexicon PDT-Vallex but the treatment of entries will be more exhaustive, for example, in the coverage of senses and in the semantic classification added to selected lexical units (meanings). The main criteria for including nouns in the lexicon will be semantic class membership and the complexity of valency patterns. Valency of nouns will be captured in the form of valency frames, enumeration of all possible combinations of adnominal participants, and corpus examples.