Comparative constructions in Portuguese and their annotation using Dependency Syntax

Magali Sanches Duran,
Lucelene Lopes,
Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo,
Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes
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Abstract

The mental ability to make comparisons is common to all humans. However, the ways of expressing comparisons in different languages may vary considerably and the grammaticalization of some forms gave rise to the so-called “comparative constructions", which are complex, highly frequent, and versatile structures used to express evaluations about various topics. Currently, due to the large volume of evaluations produced by users on the Web, interest has grown in the automatic processing of comparative constructions, with the goal of inferring, for example, which is the comparison topic, what this topic is being compared to, what is the comparison parameter, and whether the comparison is positive or negative. The first requirement to facilitate automatic processing of comparative constructions is to properly tag them in a logical and consistent way. Focusing on this goal, this paper presents guidelines for the syntactic annotation of comparative structures in Portuguese using the set of labels proposed by the Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines. The studies that formed the basis for this proposal involved the review of works on typology of languages and works specific to the Portuguese language. The guidelines were tested on the Porttinari-base corpus (Pardo et al., 2021; Duran et al. 2023) and refined until they reached the stage presented here. The set of 122 annotated sentences is available at Arborator-Grew-NILC framework for corpus annotation (Miranda & Pardo, 2022).

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