While working on valency lexicons for Czech and English, it was necessary to define treatment of multiword entities (MWEs) with the verb as the central lexical unit. Morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of such MWEs had to be formally specified in order to create lexicon entries and use them in treebank annotation. Such a formal specification has also been used for automated quality control of the annotation vs. the lexicon entries. We present a corpus-based study, concentrating on multilayer specification of verbal MWEs, their properties in Czech and English, and a comparison between the two languages using the parallel Czech-English Dependency Treebank (PCEDT). This comparison revealed interesting differences in the use of verbal MWEs in translation (discovering that such MWEs are actually rarely translated as MWEs, at least between Czech and English) as well as some inconsistencies in their annotation. Adding MWE-based checks should thus result in better quality control of future treebank/lexicon annotation. Since Czech and English are typo-logically different languages, we believe that our findings will also contribute to a better understanding of verbal MWEs and possibly their more unified treatment across languages.
展开▼
