@inproceedings{huybrecht-wiggins-2026-long,
title = "How Long Does a Quick Kiss Take? Studying Event Duration of Light Verb Constructions Using Explicit Word Embeddings",
author = "Huybrecht, Lin de and
Wiggins, Geraint A.",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.756/",
doi = "10.63317/5gsno5o8o3ve",
pages = "9618--9634",
abstract = "Psycholinguistic research indicates that choosing one syntactic construction over another to describe an event can influence its perceived duration: Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) such as punctive events in count syntax (to give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (to do research) are perceived as taking less time than their Full Verb Constructions (FVCs; to kiss and to research). Similar computational results were achieved using BERT embeddings to semantically project events onto a one-dimensional Duration scale. We reproduce and further develop this experiment with explicit word embeddings from our own co-occurrence count-based vector space. By semantically projecting 158 LVC-FVC pairs onto our Duration scale, we find that LVCs are modelled as significantly shorter than FVCs. However, we do not find an overall statistically significant difference in duration between sentences containing the target LVCs and FVCs. We demonstrate that semantic properties observed in human experiments and in BERT embeddings can also be modelled using explicit word embeddings, which have the advantage of being fully transparent. However, using transcripts from spoken conversations can be challenging when studying a specific construction: optimising the extraction of sentences containing the target expressions and composition of their meanings are to be addressed in future work."
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<abstract>Psycholinguistic research indicates that choosing one syntactic construction over another to describe an event can influence its perceived duration: Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) such as punctive events in count syntax (to give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (to do research) are perceived as taking less time than their Full Verb Constructions (FVCs; to kiss and to research). Similar computational results were achieved using BERT embeddings to semantically project events onto a one-dimensional Duration scale. We reproduce and further develop this experiment with explicit word embeddings from our own co-occurrence count-based vector space. By semantically projecting 158 LVC-FVC pairs onto our Duration scale, we find that LVCs are modelled as significantly shorter than FVCs. However, we do not find an overall statistically significant difference in duration between sentences containing the target LVCs and FVCs. We demonstrate that semantic properties observed in human experiments and in BERT embeddings can also be modelled using explicit word embeddings, which have the advantage of being fully transparent. However, using transcripts from spoken conversations can be challenging when studying a specific construction: optimising the extraction of sentences containing the target expressions and composition of their meanings are to be addressed in future work.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T How Long Does a Quick Kiss Take? Studying Event Duration of Light Verb Constructions Using Explicit Word Embeddings
%A Huybrecht, Lin de
%A Wiggins, Geraint A.
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F huybrecht-wiggins-2026-long
%X Psycholinguistic research indicates that choosing one syntactic construction over another to describe an event can influence its perceived duration: Light Verb Constructions (LVCs) such as punctive events in count syntax (to give a kiss) and durative events in mass syntax (to do research) are perceived as taking less time than their Full Verb Constructions (FVCs; to kiss and to research). Similar computational results were achieved using BERT embeddings to semantically project events onto a one-dimensional Duration scale. We reproduce and further develop this experiment with explicit word embeddings from our own co-occurrence count-based vector space. By semantically projecting 158 LVC-FVC pairs onto our Duration scale, we find that LVCs are modelled as significantly shorter than FVCs. However, we do not find an overall statistically significant difference in duration between sentences containing the target LVCs and FVCs. We demonstrate that semantic properties observed in human experiments and in BERT embeddings can also be modelled using explicit word embeddings, which have the advantage of being fully transparent. However, using transcripts from spoken conversations can be challenging when studying a specific construction: optimising the extraction of sentences containing the target expressions and composition of their meanings are to be addressed in future work.
%R 10.63317/5gsno5o8o3ve
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.756/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/5gsno5o8o3ve
%P 9618-9634
Markdown (Informal)
[How Long Does a Quick Kiss Take? Studying Event Duration of Light Verb Constructions Using Explicit Word Embeddings](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.756/) (Huybrecht & Wiggins, LREC 2026)
ACL