Morphosyntactic Constraints in the Acquisition of Linguistic Knowledge for Polish

Many approaches to the construction of language tools and acquisition of linguistic knowledge from corpora assume the application of some robust shallow parser. Construction of such a parser is difficult in the case of inflective languages with relaxed word order like Polish. The goal of the work presented here is to analyse the extent of knowledge that can be expressed in the form of morphosyntactic constraints referring to morphological properties of word forms, and its applications in the automatic extraction of syntactic and semantic knowledge. Basic properties of an extended version of the language of morphosyntactic constraints called JOSKIPI are briefly presented. The application of morphosyntactic constraints as background knowledge for extraction of disambiguation rules for Polish is discussed. A new approach to extraction of lexical semantic relations is presented: it relies on the constraints in identifying lexico-morphosyntactic dependencies among word forms in the text. Finally, a combination of the constraints and statistical analysis in the acquisition of multiword expressions is outlined.