Linguistic resources for paraphrase generation in portuguese: a lexicon-grammar approach

This paper presents a new linguistic resource for the generation of paraphrases in Portuguese, based on the lexicon-grammar framework. The resource components include: (i) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of 2100 predicate nouns co-occurring with the support verb ser de ‘be of’, such as in ser de uma ajuda inestimável ‘be of invaluable help’; (ii) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of 6000 predicate nouns co-occurring with the support verb fazer ‘do’ or ‘make’, such as in fazer uma comparação ‘make a comparison’; and (iii) a lexicon-grammar based dictionary of about 5000 human intransitive adjectives co-occurring with the copula verbs ser and/or estar ‘be’, such as in ser simpático ‘be kind’ or estar entusiasmado ‘be enthusiastic’. A set of local grammars explore the properties described in linguistic resources, enabling a variety of text transformation tasks for paraphrasing applications. The paper highlights the different complementary and synergistic components and integration efforts, and presents some preliminary evaluation results on the inclusion of such resources in the eSPERTo paraphrase generation system.