Application of morphosyntactic cues in detection of GOAL semantic role

This paper analyzes the semantics of verbs with the prefix “do-” and explains the adlativity feature based on the morpho-syntactically annotated corpus hrWaC and handcrafted verb valency frames. The work aims to automatically add all types of adlativity to Croatian verb valency lexicon. As a result, it was revealed that if a language resource encodes “do-” as the adlative prefix in Croatian as a source language, then the adlative meaning in the target language can be assumed as well. Using the valency frame transition rules for language pairs, it is possible to design matching verb valency frames in other languages and consequently describe each verb and its translation by semantic roles (agent, patient, direction-to, and goal) and by selectional restrictions.