Semi-automatic Detection of Multiword Expressions in the Slovak Dependency Treebank

We describe a method for semi-automatic extraction of Slovak multiword ex-pressions (MWEs) from a dependency treebank. The process uses an automatic conversion from dependency syntactic trees to deep syntax and automatic tag-ging of verbal argument nodes based on a valency dictionary. Both the valency dictionary and the treebank conversion were adapted from the corresponding Czech versions; the automatically translated valency dictionary has been man-ually proofread and corrected. There are two main achievements – a valency dictionary of Slovak MWEs with direct links to corresponding expressions in the Czech dictionary, PDT-Vallex, and a method of extraction of MWEs from the Slovak Dependency Treebank. The extraction reached very high precision but lower recall in a manual evaluation. This is a work in progress, the over-all goal of which is twofold: to create a Slovak language valency dictionary paralleling the Czech one, with bilingual links; and to use the extracted verbal frames in a collocation dictionary of Slovak verbs. 1