Lexical Classes

DepPattern is also provided with a configuration file, called “lexical_classes.conf”, containing word sets likely to be used in any rule. Let's see an example: instead of using directly in a rule all those possible lemmas considered as adverbial quantifiers, it is more economical to declare a lexical class, called for instance “$Quant”, instanciated by the corresponding lexical units:

$Quant = very quite more less

$Quant is a lexical variable likeky to be used in whatever rule. For instance, the rule

AdjunctLeft : ADV<lemma:$Quant> ADJ

%

states that there is an adjunct dependency between an adverb belonging to the lexical class $Quant and any adjective at its right.

Any set of words, even a huge list learnt automatically from a corpus, can become a lexical class.