Patrixa: a unification-based parser for Basque and its aplication to the automatic analysis of verbs

Abstract

In this paper we describe a computational grammar for Basque, and the first results obtained using it in the process of automatically acquiring subcategorization information about verbs and their associated sentence elements (arguments and adjuncts). The first part of this article (section 1) will be devoted to the description of Basque syntax, and to present the grammar we have developed. The grammar is partial in the sense that it cannot recognize every sentence in real texts, but it is capable of describing the main syntactic elements, such as noun-phrases (NPs), prepositional phrases (PPs), and subordinate and simple sentences. This can be useful for several applications. Next, the syntactic grammar will be used by a syntactic analyzer (or parser) to automatically acquire information on verbal subcategorization from texts (section 2). The results will later be used by a linguist or processed by statistical filters.