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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11: Selected papers from the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), London, Ontario
Edited by Silvia Perpiñán, David Heap, Itziri Moreno-Villamar and Adriana Soto-Corominas
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 11] 2017
► pp. 169–188

Chapter 8
Automatic detection of syntactic patterns from texts with application to Spanish clitic doubling

| University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

We developed an automated algorithm to retrieve direct object clitic doubling (DOCLD) examples in Spanish data from texts and the web. We focused on the Rioplatense dialect, where this kind of doubling is rather common. Given an electronic text, our procedure has two steps: first, tagging the text with an available part-of speech (PoS) tagger (TreeTagger), then inputing the tagged text into java-based code that extracts all sentences containing direct object clitics and attempts to match each clitic to a candidate doubled NP in its sentence. Identification of DOCLD cases in a short story (edited text) was 100%, whereas on unedited, raw text it was only 50%. Missing DOCLD cases are mainly caused by misspellings and lack of punctuation in the raw texts. We discuss how to improve accuracy mainly by reducing the number of false negatives.

Keywords: Web-as-corpus, automatic syntactic analysis, Rioplatense Spanish, corpus linguistics, parsing, pattern identification
Article outline
  • 1.Corpus linguistics and the World Wide Web
  • 2.Our case study: Identifying DOCLD from web texts
  • 3.Precision and recall
  • 4.Limitations of off-the-shelf tools (corpora and parsers)
  • 5.Pattern identification vs. parsing
  • 6.Curated vs. raw text
  • 7.Our strategy
    • 7.1Description of pattern matching algorithm (CLDFinder)
  • 8.Results
    • 8.1Edited, curated text
    • 8.2Raw text from the web
      • 8.2.1False positives
      • 8.2.2False negatives
  • 9.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.11.08est
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