Automatic detection of non-deverbal eventive nouns in Spanish: a quantitative, corpus-based approach

Abstract

We present a study in the field of the automatic detection of non-deverbal eventive nouns, which are those nouns that designate events but have not experienced a process of derivation from verbs, such as fiesta (`party') or cóctel (`cocktail') and, for this reason, do not present the typical morphological features of deverbal nouns, such as -ción, -miento, and are therefore more difficult to detect.

In the present research we continue and extend the work initiated by Resnik (2010), who offers a number of cues for the detection of this type of lexical unit. We apply Resnik's ideas and we also add new ones, among them, the inductive analysis of the words that tend to co-occur with eventive nouns in corpora, in order to use them as predictors of this condition. Furthermore, we simplify the classification algorithm considerably, and we apply the experiments to a larger corpus, the EsTenTen, comprising more than 9 billion running words. Finally, we present the first results of the automatic extraction of eventive nouns from the corpus, among which we find plenty non-deverbal nouns.