Patrixa: a unification-based parser for Basque and its aplication to the automatic analysis of verbs

Resumen

In this paper we describe a computational grammar for Basque, and the first results
obtained using it in the process of automatically acquiring subcategorization information
about verbs and their associated sentence elements (arguments and adjuncts). The first part
of this article (section 1) will be devoted to the description of Basque syntax, and to present
the grammar we have developed. The grammar is partial in the sense that it cannot
recognize every sentence in real texts, but it is capable of describing the main syntactic
elements, such as noun-phrases (NPs), prepositional phrases (PPs), and subordinate and
simple sentences. This can be useful for several applications. Next, the syntactic grammar
will be used by a syntactic analyzer (or parser) to automatically acquire information on
verbal subcategorization from texts (section 2). The results will later be used by a linguist
or processed by statistical filters.