When we highlight the complex structure of the interrelationships between lexicon and corpus, we have to work on the assumption of an interdependence between the two views, and we have to take into account this interdependence in any lexical or corpus analysis or application. This was also the approach taken within the LRE EAGLES (see Calzolari, McNaught, EAGLES Editors' Introduction, 1996) project towards the development of standards both in Morphosyntax and Syntax: the awareness of the interdependence between lexical specifications on the one hand, and corpus tagsets/syntactic annotations on the other, has guided the formulation of the proposals for standards and recommendations in both the Corpus and the Lexicon Work Groups of EAGLES. Corpus tagging/annotating was considered as the first obvious application of a Computational Lexicon. Therefore attention was given to the definition of compatible sets of attributes and values. The presentation will address problems of the interaction between the two types of resources, corpora and lexicons, in particular from the perspective of a standardization project.

EAGLES has first established a core set of commonly agreed annotations for morphosyntax, basically by collecting, comparing and filtering existing annotation proposals from lexicons and tagsets. Once the synthesis is available, how can it be put to use in both lexicon building and text annotation work? This question is addressed in our contribution. We want the EAGLES morphosyntax annotation to be applicable in different usage contexts, especially in both, lexicons for NLP and text corpora. Moreover, other than in many tagsets for corpus annotation, the classifications used must be strict: the classes form a hierarchy, and any item to be described has to fall in one branch of the hierarchy. Along with this structure, there is need, however, for support for manual tagging: how can we make sure that different people will classify the same facts in the same way? In EAGLES, we have tried to come close to solutions for some of the requirements stated above. We have defined a typed class hierarchy, to specify the classifications underlying our language-specific morphosyntactic coding systems. These hierarchies can be mapped onto lexicon codes as well as onto corpus tagsets, the latter is even automatic. For a subset of languages, we have written guidelines for manual annotation, which contain discussions of borderline cases, tests and a large collection of examples, to support manual coders. We have applied the tagset and guidelines to the manual coding of 60.000 word reference corpora for German and Italian. The contribution will summarize the experiences gained in this exercise, and we will point to the ressources and tools produced therein.

Comlex Syntax is a broad-coverage English lexicon which was developed specifically for natural language processing and includes detailed information on complements for verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The information we seek to capture is similar to that of EAGLES syntactic lexicons, but our focus on a single language has allowed us to define a fixed set of complement classes. These classes are defined in the dictionary as combinations of standard syntactic constituents. Comlex Syntax is accompanied by a corpus with tagged examples of the subcategorization patterns of various high-frequency verbs. Our definition mechanism for complement classes allowed us to readily add new classes for previously unseen and rare complement structures. The tagging has also required additional features (besides those in the lexicon) to account for subcategorization patterns in context. We are currently extending Comlex Syntax to include information on nominalizations. This is requiring us for the first time to link subcategorization frames from different parts of speech.