Detecting light verb constructions across languages

Abstract

Light verb constructions (LVCs) are verb and noun combinations in which the verb has lost its meaning to some degree and the noun is used in one of its original senses, typically denoting an event or an action. They exhibit special linguistic features, especially when regarded in a multilingual context. In this paper, we focus on the automatic detection of LVCs in raw text in four different languages, namely, English, German, Spanish, and Hungarian. First, we analyze the characteristics of LVCs from a linguistic point of view based on parallel corpus data. Then, we provide a standardized (i.e., language-independent) representation of LVCs that can be used in machine learning experiments. After, we experiment on identifying LVCs in different languages: we exploit language adaptation techniques which demonstrate that data from an additional language can be successfully employed in improving the performance of supervised LVC detection for a given language. As there are several annotated corpora from several domains in the case of English and Hungarian, we also investigate the effect of simple domain adaptation techniques to reduce the gap between domains. Furthermore, we combine domain adaptation techniques with language adaptation techniques for these two languages. Our results show that both out-domain and additional language data can improve performance. We believe that our language adaptation method may have practical implications in several fields of natural language processing, especially in machine translation.

Light Verb Constructions and Their Families - A Corpus Study on German ‘stehen unter’-LVCs

“…Although there exists substantive literature on the annotation of MWEs in general and of LVCs in particular (e.g. Krenn 2008;Tu and Roth 2011;Rácz et al 2014;Savary et al 2018;Nagy T. et al 2020), these studies differ in scope from the present one. The present study is not concerned with LVCs in general or LVCs headed by a specific type of light verb but is directed at a specific combination of light verb and preposition.…”

Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2021)

“…Although there exists substantive literature on the annotation of MWEs in general and of LVCs in particular (e.g. Krenn 2008;Tu and Roth 2011;Rácz et al 2014;Nagy T. et al 2020), these studies differ in scope from the present…”

Automatic Identification of Light Verb Constructions: A Review

“…MWE identification is important for NLP tools such as part-of-speech (POS) taggers, semantic parsers and syntactic parsers, as well as downstream applications such as machine translation, emotion analysis, and question answering systems (Constant et al, 2017). Recently, there has been a growing interest in Light Verb Constructions (LVC), which is a type of verbal MWE (Cordeiro & Candito, 2019;Nagy T. et al, 2020). LVCs are complex predicates that have the canonical form of verb+noun.…”