Pay attention when you pay the bills. A multilingual corpus with dependency-based and semantic annotation of collocations

Abstract

This paper presents a multilingual corpus with semantic annotation of collocations in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. The whole resource contains 155k tokens and 1, 526 collocations labeled in context. The annotated examples belong to three syntactic structures (adjective-noun, verb-object, and nominal compounds), and represent 60 lexical functions in the Meaning-Text Theory (e.g., Oper, Magn, Bon, etc.). Each collocation was annotated by three linguists and the final resource was revised by a team of experts. The resulting corpora, which are freely available, can serve as a basis to evaluate different approaches for collocation identification and classification in three languages, which in turn can be useful for different NLP tasks such as natural language generation or understanding.