Linking Verb Pattern Dictionaries of English and Spanish

Abstract

The paper presents the first step in the creation of a new multilingual and corpus-driven lexical resource by means of linking existing monolingual pattern dictionaries of English and Spanish verbs. The two dictionaries were compiled through Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA) – an empirical procedure in corpus linguistics that associates word meaning with word use by means of analysis of phraseological patterns and collocations found in corpus data. This paper provides a first look into a number of practical issues arising from the task of linking corresponding patterns across languages via both manual and automatic procedures. In order to facilitate manual pattern linking, we implemented a heuristic-based algorithm to generate automatic suggestions for candidate verb pattern pairs, which obtained 80% precision. Our goal is to kick-start the development of a new resource for verbs that can be used by language learners, translators, editors and the research community alike.