Empirical study of verbs and prepositions in European Portuguese with recourse to Web/Text Minning

This chapter describes our study of verbs and prepositions for European Portuguese as they are used in current articles in newspapers. The aim is to enrich the information that is available in dictionaries. This particular study focusses on verbs indicating movement. We have analyzed articles in six Portuguese newspapers and extracted more than 200 thousand of potentially relevant verb + preposition/prepositional locution cases. These were processed to identify similar cases and obtain the corresponding frequencies. Furthermore, we have also used a clustering algorithm with the objective of discovering clusters of similar verbs that are associated with similar prepositions/ prepositional locutions. Although this latest set of results is still preliminary, some similarities among verbs were uncovered already. We hope to consolidate these results in the future.Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, no âmbito do projeto “Verbos e Preposições em Português Europeu” (referência 139614)