Eckhard Bick - VISL

appear truncated or not, depending on phonetic harmony and vowel distribution: 'N'
may become both '-ene-' or 'en-'.
To solve this puzzle, I introduced all letter names in their various forms into
the suffix lexicon, with combination restrictions saying that they belong to the word
class 'b' (abbreviation) and have inward compatibility only with other elements of the
same type. Certain suffixes (like '-ista'), then, allow for left hand combination with
these letter elements. Since letter names also appear in the root form lexicon, the
program can now analyse party member expressions as long derivation chains of
abbreviation letters (which, formally, stand for the party name word elements).
'petebista' is thus recognised as a Portuguese word, and reads in the analysis file:
P N M/F S
In the same way, other productive expressions phonetically derived from
abbreviations, can now be tagged.
2.2.4.4 Names: problems with an immigrant society
In my system, I define the word class of proper nouns (lexicon entry 'n', PoS tag
'PROP') as capitalised words distinguished from nouns and adjectives by featuring
both number (S/P) and gender (M/F) as lexeme categories, not word form categories.
(1) LEXICON ENTRY TAG SEQUENCE
Filipinas PROP F P
Dardanelos PROP M P
Estados=Unidos PROP M P
Amado PROP M S
Berlim PROP M S
Andrómeda PROP F S
OMS PROP F S
PC PROP M S
Presently, there are about 1.300 names in the lexicon, consisting of single word
proper nouns, or lexicalised name chains 21 , about 8% being abbreviations, with a
male/female ratio of roughly 4:3 (this being about the same as for ordinary nouns).
Since proper nouns, like ordinary nouns, can trigger agreement in verb chains ('A
OMS foi lançada ...') or modifiers ('o grande Amado'), lexicon information is quite
important for disambiguation. The word 'a', which - among other things - can be
either a preposition of movement or a feminine article, can be disambiguated with
the help of the neighbouring noun's gender information in the following example.
21 I define a name chain as consisting of at least one proper noun followed by any number of non-clausal dependents
(with capitalised nouns and adjectives) and/or (possibly capitalised) distinctors (like jr., VI), and preceded by any
number of capitalised prenominals and/or (possibly capitalised) pre-name nouns (titles etc.).
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