The verb argument browser

Abstract

We present a special corpus query tool - the Verb Argument Browser - which is suitable for investigating argument structure of verbs. It can answer the following typical research question: What are the salient words which can appear in a free position of a given verb frame? In other words: What are the most important collocates of a given verb (or verb frame) in a particular morphosyntactic position? At present, the Hungarian National Corpus is integrated, but the methodology can be extended to other languages and corpora. The application has been of significant help in building lexical resources (e.g. the Hungarian WordNet) and it can be useful in any lexicographic work or even language teaching. The tool is available online at http://corpus.nytud.hu/vab (username: tsd, password: vab). © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.