Verbal Multiword Expressions Research Articles

Celebrating diversity: The origins and pathways of three support-verb constructions

Support-verb constructions are combinations of a verb and a noun that fill the predicate slot of a sentence, such as to make a suggestion in I made the suggestion that she join us. While qualifying as semantic-lexemic phrasemes (collocations and idioms) in Mel’čuk’s Sens-Texte framework, they sit at the lexicon-syntax interface. They qualify as verbal multi-word expressions lexically speaking and form complex predicates syntactically. In classical and post-classical Greek, support-verb constructions form an internally heterogenous group of constructions, yet one that has existed since the earliest records of the language and survives into the modern variety. The present chapter capitalises on the over 2000 years of continuous written history of Greek, and the internal heterogeneity of the group of support-verb constructions, in that it investigates the origins and pathways of three members of this group in the literary (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and documentary (Duke Database of Documentary Papyri) corpora of Greek. The bulk of documentary texts dates from the 3rd c. BC onwards, whereas the earliest literary texts date from around the 8th c. BC. The variety of sources allows us to trace the three structures of interest through the centuries in varying environments and thus to trace traditions and independent developments. δίκην δίδωμι dikēn didōmi existed as a collocation ‘to give judgement(s)’ from archaic times and into the medieval period, in classical times, the idiom δίκην δίδωμι dikēn didōmi ‘to pay the price for one’s actions’ arose and became indexed for the technical and higher registers. In χάριν ἀπολαμβάνω kharin apolambanō ‘to receive a favour’, the prototypical compound ἀπολαμβάνω apolambanō seems to be diatopically and subsequently diastratically indexed but retreats into the higher registers after the classical period; the canonical simplex verb λαμβάνω lambanō predates it in early classical verse and postdates it. προσέχω τὸν νοῦν prosekhō ton noun exists as an idiom especially in medical discourse from at least classical times onwards but in parallel also as a pragmateme from archaic times onwards. Support-verb constructions are a pattern that is considered near universal in languages, such that especially the methodological tool of the support-verb-construction field developed and drawn upon in this chapter is transferable beyond Greek.

Not Only Meaning… Verbel: The Electronic Dictionary of Paradigms of Polish Verbal Multiword Expressions

Abstract This article presents Verbel: The Electronic Dictionary of Paradigms of Polish Verbal Multiword Expressions (MWEs) and discusses theoretical problems connected with compiling such a dictionary for inflectionally complex languages such as Polish. The dictionary includes over 5,000 Polish verbal MWEs and explicitly presents their forms and constraints in inflection. It also provides grammatical, semantic, pragmatic and prescriptive commentaries. The first part of the article covers the theoretical and methodological basis used in the compilation of the dictionary. Generally, a verbal MWE is inflected according to the paradigm of the verb which is its main component. However, MWEs may have some specific inflectional constraints connected with other factors (e.g. semantic, pragmatic), which result in different paradigms for verbal MWEs and for the verbs that are their main components. In the second part, the conception and content of the dictionary are discussed. Finally, the natural language processing tools that underlie the work on the dictionary are described.

Determining sentiment views of verbal multiword expressions using linguistic features

AbstractWe examine the binary classification of sentiment views for verbal multiword expressions (MWEs). Sentiment views denote the perspective of the holder of some opinion. We distinguish between MWEs conveying the view of the speaker of the utterance (e.g., in “The company reinvented the wheel” the holder is the implicit speaker who criticizes the company for creating something already existing) and MWEs conveying the view of explicit entities participating in an opinion event (e.g., in “Peter threw in the towel” the holder is Peter having given up something). The task has so far been examined on unigram opinion words. Since many features found effective for unigrams are not usable for MWEs, we propose novel ones taking into account the internal structure of MWEs, a unigram sentiment-view lexicon and various information from Wiktionary. We also examine distributional methods and show that the corpus on which a representation is induced has a notable impact on the classification. We perform an extrinsic evaluation in the task of opinion holder extraction and show that the learnt knowledge also improves a state-of-the-art classifier trained on BERT. Sentiment-view classification is typically framed as a task in which only little labeled training data are available. As in the case of unigrams, we show that for MWEs a feature-based approach beats state-of-the-art generic methods.

A model for representing the semantics of MWEs: From lexical semantics to the semantic annotation of complex predicates.

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are sequences of words that pose a challenge to the computational processing of human languages due to their idiosyncrasies and the mismatch between their phrasal structure and their semantics. These idiosyncrasies are of lexical, morphosyntactic and semantic 11 nature, namely: non-compositionality, i.e., the meaning of the expression cannot be computed from the meanings of its constituents; discontinuity, i.e., alien elements may intervene; non-13 substitutability, i.e., at least one of the expression constituents is lexicalized and therefore, does not enter in alternations at the paradigmatic axis; and non-modifiability, in that they enter in syntactically 15 rigid structures, posing further constraints over modification, transformations, etc. The paper presents a model for representing MWEs at the level of semantics by taking into account all these inherent idiosyncrasies. The model assumes the form of a linguistic ontology and is applied to Greek verbal multi-word expressions (VMWEs); moreover, the semantics of the lexical entries under scrutiny is also represented via the semantics of their arguments based on corpus evidence. In this regard, modeling the semantics of VMWEs is placed in the lexicon-corpus interface.

Levels of Annotation in the Slovene Training Corpus ssj500k 2.2

Abstract This paper presents the Slovene Training Corpus ssj500k 2.2, which has been annotated on the levels of tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, syntactic dependencies, named entities, verbal multi-word expressions, and semantic role labeling. It describes the individual layers of annotation and shows the scope of using the training corpus in the production of various lexicons, such as the lexicon of multi-word units and the valency lexicon of modern Slovene. It concludes by presenting our future work, i.e. the annotation of multi-word expressions based on the Slovene Lexical Database.

PARSEME-It: an Italian corpus annotated with verbal multiword expressions

The paper describes the PARSEME-It corpus, developed within the PARSEME-It project which aims at the development of methods, tools and resources for multiword expressions (MWE) processing for the Italian language. The project is a spin-off of a larger multilingual project for more than 20 languages from several language families, namely the PARSEME COST Action. The first phase of the project was devoted to verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). They are a particularly interesting lexical phenomenon because of frequent discontinuity and long-distance dependency. Besides they are very challenging for deep parsing and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Notably, MWEs are pervasive in natural languages but are particularly difficult to be handled by NLP tools because of their characteristics and idiomaticity. They pose many challenges to their correct identification and processing: they are a linguistic phenomenon on the edge between lexicon and grammar, their meaning is not simply the addition of the meanings of the single constituents of the MWEs and they are ambiguous since in several cases their reading can be literal or idiomatic. Although several studies have been devoted to this topic, to the best of our knowledge, our study is the first attempt to provide a general framework for the identification of VMWEs in running texts and a comprehensive corpus for the Italian language.

Structural and Semantic Classification of Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Slovene

This paper is an upgraded version of a conference paper presenting the categorization of verbal multi-word expressions (VMWEs) according to the PARSEME COST Action Shared Task 1.1 Guidelines. The categorization is universal but takes into account the characteristics of the individual included languages. It was used to annotate 13,511 sentences of the Slovene ssj500k 2.0 training corpus, which resulted in 3,364 identified VMWEs categorized as inherently reflexive verbs, light verb constructions, inherently adpositional verbs, and verbal idioms. The paper presents both the quantitative and qualitative results of the analysis, compares the suggested categorization system to existing work on VMWEs in Slovene linguistics, and evaluates the use of the proposed system for future work.

Hebrew verbal multi-word expressions

Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are challenging for grammatical theories and grammar development since they blur the traditional distinction between the lexicon and the grammar, and vary in the degree of idiosyncrasy with respect to their semantic, syntactic, and morphological behavior. Nevertheless, the need to incorporate MWEs into grammars is unquestionable, especially in light of estimates claiming that MWEs account for approximately half of the entries in the lexicon. In this study we focus on verbal MWEs in Modern Hebrew: we consider different types of this class of MWEs, and propose an analysis in the framework of HPSG. Moreover, we incorporate this analysis into HeGram, a deep linguistic processing grammar of Modern Hebrew.

The variability of multi-word verbal expressions in Estonian

This article focuses on the variability of one of the subtypes of multi-word expressions, namely those consisting of a verb and a particle or a verb and its complement(s). We build on evidence from Estonian, an agglutinative language with free word order, analysing the behaviour of verbal multi-word expressions (opaque and transparent idioms, support verb constructions and particle verbs). Using this data we analyse such phenomena as the order of the components of a multi-word expression, lexical substitution and morphosyntactic flexibility.