P ortuguese Manners of Speaking (2019)

Abstract: Lexical resources need to be as complete as possible. Very little work seems to have been done on adverbs, the smallest part of speech class in Princeton WordNet counting the number of synsets. Amongst adverbs, manner adverbs ending in ‘-ly’ seem the easiest to work with, as their meaning is almost the same as the one of the associated adjective. This phenomenon seems to be parallel in English and Portuguese, where these manner adverbs finish in the suffix ‘-mente’. We use this correspondence to improve the coverage of adverbs in the lexical resource OpenWordNet-PT, a wordnet for Portuguese.

## introduction adverbs get a short shrift in lexical semantics. they have the smallest number of synsets in princeton wordnet (pwn) @xcite , perhaps rightly so, as most of their meaning, at least as far as manner adverbs are concerned, can be gleaned from the associated adjective. manner adverbs tell us about the way something happens or is done. many english adverbs are formed by adding the suffix -ly to an adjective (e.g. calm + @xmath0. many portuguese adverbs are formed in a similar manner by adding the suffix '-mente' to the singular feminine form of the adjective. for example, sincera (sincere, feminine) + 'mente' = sinceramente (sincerely). (note the 'a' in sinceramente, marking the feminine version of the adjective.) this phenomenon of pairs adjective-adverb, where morphologically only the suffix '-ly' is added to the adjective to form the adverb is very widespread both in english and in portuguese. many manner adverbs in portuguese consist of an adjective plus the suffix '-mente'. these modify a predicate or phrase, specifying how the action unfolds. they can be paraphrased by "one way of xing" or "a form of x", where x corresponds to the base adjective for the adverb's formation. for example, the adverb rapidamente/rapidly lets you qualify that a given action was performed "in a rapid way". the generic pattern here seems to be that, since most of these adverbs are a kind of "manner", and manner in portuguese is a feminine word, the adverb tends to be the feminine form of the adjective, plus the suffix '-mente'. this can be used by nlp systems, such as freeling @xcite , to avoid keeping duplicate meanings that are almost the same. for example, for stertorously, we have the feminine adjective estertorosa plus the suffix -mente, estertorosamente. we take the view that all the reasonably used adjectives and adverbs should be in the lexicon and strive to complete our online, open source portuguese wordnet @xcite . this goal of completing the a wordnet adverbial lexicon, using corpora, we share with @xcite . our work can be seen as taken a subcase of their approach (only "manner" adverbs are considered here), but looking at varied-sized corpora in portuguese. princeton wordnet v3.0 contains 3621 adverb synsets. out of the total number of adverb synsets, some 2646 synsets have word forms terminating in '-ly', which usually indicates a manner adverb, for example attributively: in an attributive manner. also most of the manner adverbs are, in first approximation, monosemous, i.e. mostly they are in a single synset. princeton wordnet statistics on polysemy can be found in https://wordnet.princeton. edu/documentation/wnstats7wn . out of the 3621 adverb synsets, 2554 have no translation in portuguese in our openwordnet-pt lexical resource @xcite , at the moment. out of these 2554 synsets, 1863 have words finishing in '-ly', so we presume that these are manner adverbs. these synsets follow the usual distribution, mostly (1375) have a single word in english. then 348 synsets have two words and 109 synsets have three words. few synsets (31) have 4 or more words. the adverbs with only a word should be the ones that are easy to translate and, in first inspection, seem to behave similarly both in english and in portuguese. since the phenomena are so similar in english and portuguese, an approach based in translations and checking should work well for our goal of completing the lexical resource in portuguese. our main goal here is to reduce the number of untranslated synsets as much as we can, as far as manner adverbs finishing in '-ly' (english) and '-mente' (portuguese) are concerned. ## pwn, omw and own-pt our work is based on using princeton word-net (pwn) and the open multilingual wordnet (omw) @xcite to improve the openwordnet-pt @xcite . pwn is one of the most used lexical resources in computational linguistics. it is the most used resource for word sense disambiguation, according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/wordnet , but it has many other applications like natural language inference, text summarizing, question answering, etc. the open multilingual wordnet (omw) @xcite provides access to open licensed wordnets in a variety of languages, all linked to the princeton wordnet of english (pwn). their goal is to make it easy to use wordnets in multiple languages. other wordnets with reasonably large number of adverbial synsets are associated to the omw, but only the french wordnet wolf (wordnet libre du franc ¸ais) @xcite seems to have had a similar problem to the one we face, of extending the adverbial coverage of synsets from english. for french, as well as for portuguese, the synsets in previously existing wordnets were not available, because of license issues. however to complete wolf, segot et al had the lexicon lefff and the synonyms database dicosyn to help them and we have not found similar resources for portuguese. openwordnet-pt (own-pt) is an ongoing project to build up a large wordnet for portuguese. own-pt is still half the size of pwn, and we have done so far only partial evaluations of its coverage. for instance, punctual evaluations of verbs was done in @xcite and of (gentilic) adjectives in @xcite . several discussions on nominalizations and their arguments are presented in @xcite @xcite . as suggested in @xcite the use of a visual interface for own-pt helps to discover some interesting subsets of synsets to work on, like the ones ending in "ly" that we investigate here. own-pt is the portuguese wordnet in the omw project, it has currently 47,932 synsets, 56,928 word forms and 81,374 senses. ## kinds of adverbs translation seems to work fairly well for this tightly restricted subset of manner adverb synsets, but there are still some generic issues and problems. wordnet and other lexical resources have to cope with affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and these seem to be used differently in different languages. for instance portuguese has no suffix "less" as in bloodlessly, mindlessly, and painlessly. one needs to use a separate preposition sem/without to express the same meaning sem sangue, sem pensar, sem dor, respectively. thus corresponding to the suffix "less" in english we need adverbial phrases instead of adverbs for adjetives and adverbs in portuguese. pwn lists 76 synsets that are manner adverbs ending in "lessly". of course these can have single word translations in portuguese, but these are not as direct as we would like them to be. for instance for bloodlessly (in the appropriate abstract synset 00418712-r) we can use the similar pacificamente/pacifically but the direct translation would be an adverbial locution sem sangue/without blood. english also has several ways of negating an adjective. the preffix "un" appears in several of the manner adverbs, for example in unofficially, unde-servedly, and unmelodiously. this prefix has no exact corresponding version in portuguese. thus while the positive versions e.g. officially, deservedly, and melodiously have exact correspondents in portuguese (namely oficialmente, merecidamente, and melodiosamente), the negative versions do not exist as single words in portuguese. again we need either adverbial expressions (e.g. não oficialmente or less direct translations, like dissonantemente for unmelodiously. for a few words we have the similar prefix "i/in" in imerecidamente. princeton wordnet has 202 synsets for manner adverbs of the form 'un*ly', out of which, 153 have no portuguese words at all, to begin with. english has an extremely useful way of creating adjectives from nouns, by adding a "y" or "ly" to the noun. for example sandy, hilly, and pearly mean "like sand", "with many hills" and "of the off-white color of pearls". some of these are considered informal language and do not appear in pwn, for example yellowy, which is in the collins online dictionary but not in pwn. some of these adjectives coming from nouns do not seem to have similars in portuguese, for example girly, womanly, and manly. we can say femininamente and masculinamente in portuguese and we can say womanly and manly in english, but we do not have the adverbs femininely and masculinely in english, neither do we have meninamente, mulhermente, or homenmente in portuguese. for some cases, where the adverb/adjective pair comes from a noun, e.g. thirstily, thirsty, and thirst, in portuguese we can have the noun and the adjective, but the adverb is much less used. so sede (noun) and sedento (adjective) are common enough, but sedentamente (adverb) is less so. the meaning in this case is obvious and if someone uses the word, they will be understood, but it is not widespread. other suffixes that do not translate well are the very anglo-saxon ones like "ward" (in the direction of) as in e.g. heavenward. sometimes an almost exact translation exists, but the words are not from the same root. for example regally: in a regal manner corresponds to regiamente: uma maneira de ser rei. we have to be careful with the so called faux amis. for instance the work cruelly in english has two fairly distinct meanings or synsets: 00232425r cruelly (excessively; "a cruelly bitter winter") and 00232499-r cruelly (with cruelty; "he treated his students cruelly") the first one is not what cruelmente means in portuguese, it means something like excessivamente/excessively only, while the second is exactly the same meaning as the portuguese word, some kind of evilness. to make it clear, we do say in portuguese um inverno cruel, (a cruel winter), but the adverb is not used in this sense. all of these issues have to be manually checked and we are in the process of doing so. ## tools and evaluation evaluation of semi-automatically constructed resources is a thorny subject. there are no canonical ways of evaluating these resources, the usual mechanical turk style evaluation seems both pointless and not objective enough. however, there are plenty of lists of most used words on the web, usually collected by teachers of english as a second language and these may help us guarantee that, at least the most used manner concepts are in place. we used a collection of lists to evaluate this work. we checked lists of both english and portuguese adverbs. the first list of english adverbs, comes from the english club foot_0 , and consists of 130 popular manner adverbs in english, translated automatically and manually verified. we check how many of these 130 adverbs, are already present in openwordnet-pt. this is a qualitative measure, as the english adverbs (automatically translated) are sometimes polysemous and translations, even trying to keep roots, whenever possible, can lead to different results. with this list we were hoping to check our coverage for popular manner adverbs, as a list produced for learners of english as a second language tries to cover as many popular meanings as possible. the results were not very inspiring. out of 130 english verbs translated, 5 were not of the form ending in -mente in portuguese. then of the 125 left, 45 were not present in own-pt, so we were missing 36% of this set. we had expected to have a number closer to the whole set already covered. however, many of the adverbs coming out from this list are not very popular in portuguese. so we decided to check the manner adverbs in the parallel universal dependencies corpora 2 , since these exist both in portuguese and english and they are already aligned. parallel universal dependencies (pud) treebanks were created for the conll 2017 shared task on multilingual parsing from raw text to universal dependencies foot_2 . there are 1000 sentences in each language, always in the same order. the sentences are taken from the news domain and from wikipedia. there are usually only a few sentences from each document, selected randomly, not necessarily adjacent, so sentences usually make sense by themselves. there are 127 manner adverbs ending in -ly in the english parallel treebank pud-en. perhaps surprisingly, pwn misses three of these adverbs proactively, definitively, logistically. these can arguably be considered newish adverbs, if one looks at the usage distribution provided by google, e.g. figure 1 . we checked whether all 127 english manner adverbs had translations in portuguese and found that only 12 synsets had not, more in line with what we were expecting. two of these 12 were not in pwn to begin with, so we had to add word forms to our resource in portuguese for ten synsets. these synsets correspond to adverbs reportedly, unusually, thematically, technologically, posthumously, persistently, mindlessly, inimitably, culturally, catastrophically. taking advantage of the parallelism of the resources, we then looked at all the "-mente" adverbs in the parallel universal dependencies corpus in portuguese (pud-pt). there we found 118 adverbs ending inmente, of which only 10 were not described in the openwordnet-pt. (of the three adverbs missing in pwn two would need to be added to portuguese too (logistically, proactively, but definitivamente, corresponding to definitively was already in the base.) the portuguese manner adverbs added ## conclusion we worked to semi-automatically complete the openwordnet-pt, as far as adverbs of manner, finishing in "ly" (in english) or "-mente" (in portuguese) are concerned. these adverbs are called "deadjectival", as they are usually a "way of x" where x is an adjective. the phenomenon seems completely parallel in english and portuguese and hence it seemed to us that it should be an easy task to accomplish. the task proved somewhat more complicated than envisaged. out of the 1863 synsets with no portuguese words we have managed to manually check some 600 and this uncovered some similarities and issues that seem worth pointing out. we also realized that an open dictionary of deadjetival adverbs that we had intended to use as a superset of our synsets (portal da língua portuguesa http://www. portaldalinguaportuguesa.org/ ) has too many entries that we do not feel confortable listing, as they do not seem very much used in the portuguese we speak. on the positive side, the way we found of comparativaly checking the parallel universal dependencies corpus points out a new application of these parallel corpora, to help evaluate coverage of lexical resources. we plan to use it for checking adjectives and verbs in pwn and own-pt in the near future. finally, we need to finish checking all the other thousand adverbial synsets in pwn, which are empty in portuguese. we also plan to develop our own dictionary of deadjectival pairs that work both in english and portuguese.