Meaning Representation for Automatic Extraction of Lexical Functions

Resumen. Lexical functions formalize semantic and syntactic relations between lexical units, given that meaning of an individual word largely depends on various relations connecting it to other words in context. Collocational relation is a type of institutionalized lexical relations that holds between the base and its partner in a collocation in contrast to free word combination where both words are used in their typical meaning. Collocation are important for natural language processing because collocation comprises the restrictions on how words can be used together. The formalism of lexical functions is a means of representing such information. If collocations are annotated with lexical functions in a computer readable dictionary, it allows effective use of collocations in natural language applications including parsers, high quality machine translation, periphrasis systems and computer-aided learning of lexica. In order to create such applications, we need to extract lexical functions from corpora automatically. For this, we represent the lexical meaning of a given word with a set of all its hypernyms extracted from the Spanish WordNet.