LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 23:6 June 2023
ISSN 1930-2940

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Development of Verb Frames for Nepali

Krishna Maya Manger, M.A. (Nepali), M.A. (Linguistics)

Abstract

This paper describes the method and procedures of building Verb Frames for the Nepali language which is developed as a part of doctoral research. A total of 486 Verb Frames have been developed for 200 ambiguous Nepali verbs following the theoretical framework provided by Begum (2017) with some modifications. Our Verb Frame captures lexical, syntactic and semantic information about each sense of a particular verb with due focus on its argument structure and ontology. The significance of Verb Frames is seen in the area of NLP, especially in Parsing and Word Sense Disambiguation. It provides a detailed description of the linguistic attributes of Nepali verbs for scholars who are interested in studying verbs in the language.

Keywords: Nepali, Verbs, Ambiguity, Verb Frames, Argument Structure.

1. Introduction

The verb is a core grammatical category of a language that plays a pivotal role in determining the functions of each argument in a sentence. It is a central element in a sentence without which the structure of a sentence seems impossible. That is why the database of verbs which provides linguistic information about a verb has become a major focus in the field of automatic processing of a language at present. There are different approaches for building linguistic resources which could capture all the necessary information about a verb 'ranging from phonological and morphological to syntactic, semantic and pragmatic criteria' (Walde, 2009). In this context, Verb Frame is a kind of knowledge base which can be used as a linguistic resource, particularly in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

The origin of the concept of verb frame is presumed to be started from the work of Chomsky (1965) which presented the idea of a sub-categorization frame for the first time. The sub-categorization according to Chomsky denotes 'the ability/necessity for lexical items (usually verbs) to require (allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur' (Chomsky, 1965). The notion of sub-categorization looks similar to the notion of valency in the sense that both account for the number and status of arguments in a sentence. But the two are different since sub-categorization in its original meaning did not include the subject.

Though modern theories include the subject in the sub-categorization frame as well, whereas valency was perceived as the number of arguments including the subject from the very beginning. However, this study takes the Verb Frame in a particular sense which has its root in the work of Levin's classification of English verbs (Levin, 1993) which has inspired later development of the concept in many different ways. VerbNet (Schuler, 2005), FrameNet (Baker et al, 1998), PropBank (Palmer et al, 2005), and WordNet (Miller, 1995) are the works which have contributed in the development of the concept, especially for natural language processing. Verb Frame in this study, is a tabular representation that 'captures linguistic information about the syntactic distribution of a verb in a language' (Begum, 2017).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Krishna Maya Manger, M.A. (Nepali), M.A. (Linguistics)
Assistant Professor
Department of Nepali
University of North Bengal
Siliguri, West Bengal, India, 734013
krishnamanger@gmail.com
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