The acquisition of some lexical constraints from corpora

This paper presents an approach to acquisition of some lexical and grammatical constraints from large corpora. Constraints that are discussed are related to grammatical features of a preposition and the corresponding noun phrase that constitute a prepositional phrase. The approach is based on the extraction of a textual environment of a preposition from a corpus, which is then tagged using the system of electronic dictionaries. An algorithm for computation of some kind of the minimal representation of grammatical features associated with the corresponding noun phrases is suggested. The resulting set of features describes the constraints that a noun phrase has to fulfil in order to form a correct prepositional phrase with a given preposition. This set can be checked against other corpora.