A Spanish e-dictionary of collocations

Abstract

We present a new e-dictionary of Spanish (in progress) calledDiretes (DIccionario RETicular de ESpañol). It contains descriptions of collocations by means of Lexical Functions (LFs), both standard and non-standard, in the sense of the Meaning –Text Theory by Igor Mel’čuk. At present,Diretescontains about 50,000 collocations.This paper concentrates on thecollocations in which the collocate is an adjectival or an adverbial phrase. These collocations are mostly extracted from the Prácticocombinatorial dictionary of modern Spanish. We explain the structure of the e-dictionary, the types of information it contains and the way it is presented. We also show how the LF-interpreted collocations can be used in NLP applications. We demonstrate it with the SemETAPsemantic analyzer, in which LFs are used to normalize semantic structures and make inferences.