Compound Adverbs as an Issue in Machine Analysis of Czech language

Compound adverbs represent an interesting issue in terms of Automatic Morphological Analysis (AMA). The reason is that compound adverbs in Czech are expressions formed by compounding existing words that are different parts of speech without any change in their form. An indicative sign of compound adverbs is that they can always be decomposed again. Compound adverbs may be written as one word but sometimes a multiword form coexists. A word that is originally a different part of speech gains an adverbial meaning and becomes an adverb. This article presents the results of a corpus probe aimed at mapping expressions that are demonstrably compound adverbs and were not recognized by AMA or were incorrectly tagged by AMA as another part of speech. Analysis of data obtained from the Czech National Corpus (ČNK) SYN v3 show that the unrecognized and incorrectly tagged units can be divided into several groups. Based on knowledge of these groups it is possible to refine part of speech tagging by AMA. The corpus probe examined units written in accordance with the current codification as well as substandard units.