Development of a Lexical Resource Annotated with Semantic Roles for Portuguese

Abstract

This paper presents a lexical resource developed for Portuguese. The resource contains sentences annotated with semantic roles. The sentences were extracted from two domains: Cardiology research papers and newspaper articles. Both corpora were analyzed with the PALAVRAS parser and subsequently processed with a subcategorization frames extractor, so that each sentence that contained at least one main verb was stored in a database together with its syntactic organization. The annotation was manually carried out by a linguist using an annotation interface. Both the annotated and non-annotated data were exported to an XML format, which is readily available for download. The reason behind exporting non-annotated data is that there is syntactic information collected from the parser annotation in the non-annotated data, and this could be useful for other researchers. The sentences from both corpora were annotated separately, so that it is possible to access sentences either from the Cardiology or from the newspaper corpus. The full resource presents more than seven thousand semantically annotated sentences, containing 192 different verbs and more than 15 thousand individual arguments and adjuncts.