Verb Argument Browser - investigating argument structure of verbs
magyar változat
- What do we run after most of the time? (money)
- What kind of things can be in danger? (life, victory, soccer gate …)
- What is the most characteristic object of shrug? (shoulder)
- Which verbs do we use commonly with the word scandal? (break, erupt …)
- Which nouns can appear as an into-dependent of take
besides the most common account and consideration? (custody, partnership, use …)
… similar questions can be answered
using the
Verb Argument Browser.
This tool reveals the typical usages of verbs
in terms of how nouns (or adjectives) are collocated with verbs
as certain dependents.
You can find out what typical words
may appear beside a given verb as a certain dependent
(characterized by Hungarian case endings or postpositions),
whether it is an argument, a free abverbial
or a word that constitutes an idiomatic expression together with the verb.
Almost all of our utterances consist of a verb and its dependents,
many linguistic phenomena can be captured through verbs and dependents.
Frequency relationships of various constructions can be studied,
as well as the valency of nouns, adjectives and preverbs.
Log in to the query interface of the VAB.
It can be used …
- in linguistic research
(predicate-argument structure, idioms, psycholinguistic experiment design,
etc.) as a source of linguistic and frequency data;
- in language technology
(e.g. during the creation of a syntactic parser);
- in practical translation work
as a kind of collocation dictionary
for mapping various verb-argument collocations;
- in mother tongue education (in schools)
to illustrate some of the phenomena of the Hungarian language
(for example, we can examine the variability of sayings
or the differences between verb synonyms);
- in teaching of Hungarian as a foreign language to help students
speak Hungarian
not only grammatically correctly
but also the way “as a Hungarian would speak”,
through the knowledge of frequent collocations.
The corpus behind the tool is the 187 million word
Hungarian National Corpus
(first version).
It is freely available after a combined
registration
(for VAB and HNC together).
Log in to the query interface of the VAB.
The complete database of the
VAB is
available for research purposes (page in Hungarian).
Basically, the tool is created for investigating the Hungarian language,
but using an appropriate corpus the technology
can be applied to other languages as well.
English examples above are just for better clarity.
More detailed information:
a paper and
a presentation.
Please,
inform us
about your research using our tool and refer to the VAB as:
Sass, Bálint: The Verb Argument Browser. In: Sojka, P. et al. (eds.): Proceedings of TSD 2008, Brno, Czech Republic, 2008, LNCS 5246, 187-192, http://corpus.nytud.hu/vab
Have a look at the new corpus query interface of the expanded
Hungarian National Corpus as well.
