The Comlex Syntax Lexicon and the Eagles Subcategorization Standard

The Comlex Syntax Lexicon and the Eagles Subcategorization Standard
Ralph GRISHMAN/Catherine McLEOD
Comlex Syntax is a broad-coverage English lexicon which was developed specifically for natural language processing and includes detailed information on complements for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The information we seek to capture is similar to that of EAGLES syntactic lexicons, but our focus on a single language has allowed us to define a fixed set of complement classes. These classes are defined in the dictionary as combinations of standard syntactic constituents.

Comlex Syntax is accompanied by a corpus with tagged examples of the subcategorization patterns of various high-frequency verbs. Our definition mechanism for complement classes allowed us to readily add new classes for previously unseen and rare complement structures. The tagging has also required additional features (besides those in the lexicon) to account for subcategorization patterns in context.

We are currently extending Comlex Syntax to include information on nominalizations. This is requiring us for the first time to link subcategorization frames from different parts of speech.