Empirical study of verbs and prepositions in european portuguese with recourse to Web/Text mining

This chapter describes our study of verbs and prepositions for European Portugueseas they are used in current articles in newspapers. The aim is to enrich the informationthat is available in dictionaries. This particular study focusses on verbs indicatingmovement. We have analyzed articles in six Portuguese newspapers and extracted morethan 200 thousand of potentially relevant verb + preposition/prepositional locutioncases. These were processed to identify similar cases and obtain the correspondingfrequencies. Furthermore, we have also used a clustering algorithm with the objectiveof discovering clusters of similar verbs that are associated with similar prepositions/prepositional locutions. Although this latest set of results is still preliminary, somesimilarities among verbs were uncovered already. We hope to consolidate these resultsin the future