Using Electronic Dictionaries and NooJ to Generate Sentences Containing English Phrasal Verbs

摘要

This paper attempts to explore NooJ's "generation" mode to automatically produce transformations of sentences containing English Phrasal Verbs (PV). We exploit the same electronic dictionary and grammar previously used to recognize PV in large corpora (Machonis 2010, 2012), but have had to design a specific grammar for generating sentences, following the examples in Silberztein (2016), which showed how NooJ could generate over two million transformations or parallel sentences from the simple sentence Joe likes Lea. We created a grammar that can generate variations of a single phrase containing one of the PV found in the NooJ PV dictionary. For the moment the grammar only handles singular nouns in the present and past tense, but it is capable of applying a succession of transformations - particle movement, preterit, negation, clefting, modal insertion, aspect introduction, question formation, and passive voice, along with various combinations of these transformations - to over 1,200 PV from the electronic dictionary.