Review on Light Verb Constructions in Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Light verb constructions (LVC) are an interesting phenomenon that occurs in many languages. It is a category of verbal Multiword Expressions (MWE) and has the canonical form of verb+noun (Constant et al., 2017; Cordeiro and Candito, 2019; Nagy T., Rácz and Vincze, 2020). Examples of LVCs include give help, make a decision, and take a walk. Identifying LVCs is essential for many natural language processing (NLP) applications which include summarization, machine translation, semantic parsing, question answering, and information extraction. The importance of LVC identification to these downstream applications has recently spurred a growing volume of work in both the field of linguistics as well as computational linguistics in various languages as it can potentially increase the performance of these tasks. This paper presents a review of existing work related to LVC identification by summarizing gaps identified and proposing some future work that could bring novel contributions. Keywords: Light verb constructions, Multiword expressions, Natural Language Processing