Acquisition of a New Type of Lexical-Semantic Relation from German Corpora

In this paper we will report on work in progress towards increasing the relational density of the German wordnet. It is also an experiment in corpus-based lexical acquisition. The source of the acquisition is a large corpus of German newspaper texts. The target is the German wordnet (GermaNet). We acquire a new type of lexical-semantic relation, i.e. the relation between the verbal head of a predicate and the nominal head of its argument. We investigate how the insertion of instances of this relation into the German wordnet GermaNet affects the neighbourhood of the nodes which are connected by an instance of the new relation. Special attention is given in this paper to the language-specific aspects of the acquisition process.