Lexical Annotation for Multi-word Entries Containing Nominalizations

New York University has produced a dictionary of nominalizations (NOMLEX) whose entries capture the relationship of the nominalization with its associated verb. This dictionary indicates where the verbal arguments may be found in the noun phrase which contains the nominalization. We have now made a study and produced some entries for nominalizations and their co-occurring verbs. These entries are much more complex than NOMLEX entries. In order to express all the relationships between the nominalization and its co-occurring verb, we made use of the terminology of Igor Mel’ĉuk, whose theories have been used to create dictionaries in French and Russian. His categories were found to be very useful for this task. The verb + nominalization pairs were selected by frequency of co-occurrence and thus do not strictly conform to what are considered support verbs. Support verbs are generally defined as having no semantic content, serving only to carry tense and number which the nominalization cannot express. A typical example of this is “commit a murder”. The paper below describes the NOMLEX entry which is the basis of this work and then demonstrates the additional information needed to describe the verb + nominalization pair.