Central to the task of understanding a natural language text is determining its predicate-argument structure -- the Owho did what to whomO information about the text. Determining this information requires knowledge about the argument structure of words in the text. COMLEX Syntax, developed at NYU for natural language processing, provides detailed information about the syntax of verbs, but there is no comparably rich resource for nouns. This project develops a design for such a dictionary and creates entries for approximately 1,600 commonly occurring nouns which take arguments. The dictionary entries are created using a menu-based interface which provides access to a large text concordance and allows coders to capture relevant citations during the entry process. This is the first step to providing the natural language research community with a broad-coverage resource for text analysis.
