Syntax-based distributional models of lexical semantics provide a flexible and linguistically adequate representation of co-occurrence information. However, their construction requires large, accurately parsed corpora, which are unavailable for most languages. In this paper, we develop a number of methods to overcome this obstacle. We describe (a) a crosslingual approach that constructs a syntax-based model for a new language requiring only an English resource and a translation lexicon; and (b) multilingual approaches that combine crosslingual with monolingual information, subject to availability. We evaluate on two lexical semantic benchmarks in German and Croatian. We find that the models exhibit complementary profiles: crosslingual models yield higher accuracies while monolingual models provide better coverage. In addition, we show that simple multilingual models can successfully combine their strengths.

An experiment is presented to induce a set of polysemous basic type alternations (such as Animal-Food, or Building-Institution) by deriving them from the sense alternations found in an existing lexical resource. The paper builds on previous work and applies those results to the Italian lexicon PAROLE SIMPLE CLIPS. The new results show how the set of frequent type alternations that can be induced from the lexicon is partly different from the set of polysemy relations selected and explicitely applied by lexicographers when building it. The analysis of mismatches shows that frequent type alternations do not always correpond to prototypical polysemy relations, nevertheless the proposed methodology represents a useful tool offered to lexicographers to systematically check for possible gaps in their resource.

This paper discusses an extension of the V-measure (Rosenberg and Hirschberg, 2007), an entropy-based cluster evaluation metric. While the original work focused on evaluating hard clusterings, we introduce the Fuzzy V-measure which can be used on data that is inherently ambiguous. We perform multiple analyses varying the sizes and ambiguity rates and show that while entropy-based measures in general tend to suffer when ambiguity increases, a measure with desirable properties can be derived from these in a straightforward manner.