Automatic animacy classification for Dutch

We present an automatic animacy classifier for Dutch that can determine the animacy status of nouns -- how alive the noun's referent is (human, inanimate, etc.). Animacy is a semantic property that has been shown to play a role in human sentence processing, felicity and grammaticality. Although animacy is not marked explicitly in Dutch, we expect knowledge about animacy to be helpful for parsing, translation and other NLP tasks. Only a few animacy classifiers and animacy- annotated corpora exist internationally. For Dutch, animacy information is only available in the Cornetto lexical-semantic... Mehr ...