Romanian Valence Dictionary in XML Format

Valence dictionaries are dictionaries in which logical predicates (most of the times verbs) are inventoried alongside with the semantic and syntactic information regarding the role of the arguments with which they combine, as well as the syntactic restrictions these arguments have to obey. In this article we present the incipient stage of the project “Syntactic and semantic database in XML format: an HPSG representation of verb valences in Romanian”. Its aim is the development of a valence dictionary in XML format for a set of 3000 Romanian verbs. Valences are specified for each sense of each verb, alongside with an illustrative example, possible argument alternations and a set of multiword expressions in which the respective verb occurs with the respective sense. The grammatical formalism we make use of is Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, which offers one of the most comprehensive frames of encoding various types of linguistic information for lexical items. XML is the most appropriate mark-up language for describing information structured in HPSG framework. The project can be further on extended so that to cover all Romanian verbs (around 7000) and also other predicates (nouns, adjectives, prepositions).