Implementing European Portuguese verbal idioms in a natural language processing system
Résumé
This paper is based on an extant lexicon-grammar of European Portuguese verbal idioms, e.g., 'deitar mãos à obra' (literally, 'throw hands to the work‘), 'start working‘. This is a database containing about 2,400 expressions, along with all relevant information on the sentence structure, distributional constraints and transformational properties of these frozen sentences. In this paper, we present a solution to the integration of verbal idioms in a fully-fledged natural language processing system, and a preliminary evaluation using a small, manually annotated corpus.