Language and Literature Didactics

In Basque, there is recurrent tendency to express both the source and goal of movement for the description of translational motion even in cases where one of these elements is pleonastic. This construction called 'Complete Path' shows up not only in physical description of motion but also in a good number of different metaphorical and idiomatic expressions. At first sight, these metaphorical expressions do not seem to follow any clear pattern: some expressions express 'quickness', some others 'period of time', and some others 'manner'. In this paper, we argue against this position. We propose that all these expressions form a coherent, structured, and motivated group. We will base this claim on the following theoretical assumptions: (i) the 'Complete path' is a 'construction' in terms of and construction grammar; (ii) these meanings are the result of what Turner (1998, 2002) called conceptual integration. The physical experience of a translational motion from one place to another is blended with whatever the semantic content of the landmark denotes.

In this work, different occurrences of the connective (land" in some Basque proverbs gathered in the 16 th and 19 th centuries are studied. {:And" appears in grammatically definable types of constructions beyond pragmatic ambiguity; the environments where ((and" occurs show a fixed pattern linked to a conceptual structure. This work focuses on the less fixed pattern of the typology ((A and B is Y", where the first term mentioned "A" is defined in terms of the second ((B" demonstrating the important role played by analogy. There is also a complex variety of coordinated proverbs, which link two seemingly independent proverbs; in these proverbs ((and" provokes a shift in point of view of the fictional utterer. The evaluative string (Y) poses the question of the directionality of the proverb, when there are variants of the same proverb, one of them lacking the string, what the presupposition range of the given cultural milieu is, from Honeck's (1997) ({Generic Ideals" to Kay's (1996) "context proposition". The methodology is based on Turner and Fauconnier's Blending Theory (1998) and Conceptual Integration Networks (Turner & Fauconnier 2001), and on contemporary Rhetoric of Argument (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca), The simple type ofproverbs falls either under the category of "one-sided shared organizing topology" or under the category of ((unfilled shared topology network". In the complex type ofproverbs, two asymmetric spaces are linked, but analogously to the simple type, the second part of the proverb constraints the meaning of the first part. Two alternative space configurations for proverb understanding are provided. * For Ana, my dearest friend. And for Doctor Michael Marcuse, from whom I learned the ethics ofa true scholar.

This paper deals with the exploitation of dictionaries for the semi-automatic construction of lexicons and lexical knowledge bases. The final goal of our research is to enrich the Basque Lexical Database with semantic information such as senses, definitions, semantic relations, etc., extracted from a Basque monolingual dictionary. The work here presented focuses on the extraction of the semantic relations that best characterise the headword, that is, those of synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, and other relations marked by specific relators and derivation. All nominal, verbal and adjectival entries were treated. Basque uses morphological inflection to mark case, and therefore semantic relations have to be inferred from suffixes rather than from prepositions. Our approach combines a morphological analyser and surface syntax parsing (based on Constraint Grammar), and has proven very successful for highly inflected languages such as Basque. Both the effort to write the rules and the actual processing time of the dictionary have been very low. At present we have extracted 42,533 relations, leaving only 2,943 (9%) definitions without any extracted relation. The error rate is extremely low, as only 2.2% of the extracted relations are wrong.

We present a new morphological processor for Biscayan, a dialect of Basque, developed on the description of the morphology of standard Basque. The database for the standard morphology has been extended for dialects and an opensource tool for morphological description named foma is used for building the processor. XuxenB, a spelling checker/corrector for this dialect, is the first application of this work.

Using a prototype approach to emotion concepts, two studies were conducted in the Basque Country, where an ancient non-Indo-European language is still spoken, to identify the mental state words that Basque speakers are most certain name emotions (emozioak) and to map the hierarchical and family resemblance structure of the most prototypical 124 emotion concepts. Cluster analysis of sorting data collected in the Basque Country revealed five basic level emotion categories similar to those found in American English and Indonesian (love, happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) as well as five other small positive emotion categories. All major categories found at the basic level contained several terms that are not traceable to Romance languages. Also in line with the American and Indonesian results, the basic level categories in Basque fell within two large superordinate categories: positive and negative emotions. Each of the five large basic level categories contained several subordinate level categories. The results suggest that the emotion lexicons, and corresponding conceptualisations of the emotion domain, in the Basque Country, Indonesia, and the US are similar, although there are some important differences.

This paper describes the representation of Basque Multiword Lexical Units and the automatic processing of Multiword Expressions. After discussing and stating which kind of multiword expressions we consider to be processed at the current stage of the work, we present the representation schema of the corresponding lexical units in a generalpurpose lexical database. Due to its expressive power, the schema can deal not only with fixed expressions but also with morphosyntactically flexible constructions. It also allows us to lemmatize word combinations as a unit and yet to parse the components individually if necessary. Moreover, we describe HABIL, a tool for the automatic processing of these expressions, and we give some evaluation results. This work must be placed in a general framework of written Basque processing tools, which currently ranges from the tokenization and segmentation of single words up to the syntactic tagging of general texts.

This paper describes the components used in the design and implementation of NLP tools for Basque. These components are based on finite state technology and are devoted to the morphological analysis of Basque, an agglutinative pre-Indo-European language. We think that our design can be interesting for the treatment of other languages. The main components developed are a general and robust morphological analyser/generator and a spelling checker/corrector for Basque named Xuxen. The analyser is a basic tool for current and future work on NLP of Basque, such as the lemmatiser/tagger Euslem, an Intranet search engine or an assistant for verse-making.

In this paper we present the results of the combination of stochastic and rule-based disambiguation methods applied to Basque languagel. The methods we have used in disambiguation are Constraint Grammar formalism and an HMM based tagger developed within the MULTEXT project. As Basque is an agglutinative language, a morphological analyser is needed to attach all possible readings to each word. Then, CG rules are applied using all the morphological features and this process decreases morphological ambiguity of texts. Finally, we use the MULTEXT project tools to select just one from the possible remaining tags. Using only the stochastic method the error rate is about 14%, but the accuracy may be increased by about 2% enriching the lexicon with the unknown words. When both methods are combined, the error rate of the whole process is 3.5%. Considering that the training corpus is quite small, that the HMM model is a first order one and that Constraint Grammar of Basque language is still in progress, we think that this combined method can achieve good results, and it would be appropriate for other agglutinative languages.

This paper describes the work carried out to improve the robustness of the morphological,analyser/generator for Basque which can be adapted to several domains,and variants of the language. This analyser is used as a lemmatiser in several IR applications such as an Intranet search engine. We present an enhanced analyser that deals not only with standard words but also with

This paper presents the conclusions reached from the development of a system for Named Entity recognition in written Basque. The system was designed in four steps: first, the development of a recognizer based on linguistic information represented on finite-state-transducers; second, the generation of semi-automatically annotated corpora from the result of these transducers; third, the achievement of the best possible recognizer by training different ML techniques on these corpora; and finally, the combination of the different recognizers obtained. Being Basque an agglutinative language, a linguistic preprocess previous to these steps was required.

This paper describes the components used in the design and implementation of NLP tools for Basque. These components are based on finite state technology and are devoted to the morphological analysis of Basque, an agglutinative pre-Indo-European language. We think that our design can be interesting for the treatment of other languages. The main components developed are a general and robust morphological analyser/generator and a spelling checker/corrector for Basque named Xuxen. The analyser is a basic tool for current and future work on NLP of Basque, such as the lemmatiser/tagger Euslem, an Intranet search engine or an assistant for verse-making.

Azken urteotan testu teknikoetatik terminologia automatikoki erauzteko tresnak ari dira garatzen zenbait hizkuntzatarako, ingeleserako batez ere. Lengoaia Naturalaren Prozesamenduan (NLP) eta beste eremutan egindako ikerketen ondorioz teknologia prest dago horrelako aplikazioak garatu ahal izateko, nahiz eta emaitzak ikusita oraindik giza laguntza behar izan, automatikoki hautatutako terminologiaren artean azken aukeraketa egiteko.

We present a new morphological processor for Biscayan, a dialect of Basque, developed on the description of the morphology of standard Basque. The database for the standard morphology has been extended for dialects and an opensource tool for morphological description named foma is used for building the processor. XuxenB, a spelling checker/corrector for this dialect, is the first application of this work.