Coordination of -mente ending adverbs in Portuguese: An integrated solution

Abstract

Portuguese -mente ending adverbs constitute a large, morphologically homogenous, but syntactically and semantically diverse lexical set. When coordinated, the first adverb loses the adverbial suffix and takes the shape of the base adjective, in the feminine-singular form. This raises the issue of its part-of-speech (POS) classification (adverb or adjective?), but especially its adequate parsing, since it may then be incorrectly analyzed as a modifier of a preceding noun. However, the POS tagging can not be adequately performed prior to some minimal syntactic analysis. The size of the lexicon involved (more than 7,000 adverbs) and the scarcity of instances, even in large corpora, make it ineffective to leave only for the POS tagger the task of solving this adjective/reduced adverbial form ambiguity. This paper proposes an integrated solution, where a rule-base disambiguating module and a POS statistical tagger combine to produce more accurate tagging and better parsing results to this non-trivial empirical problem. The system was evaluated on a large-sized corpus. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.