Compositionality in Verb-Particle Constructions

Archna Bhatia, Choh Man Teng, James Allen


Abstract
We are developing a broad-coverage deep semantic lexicon for a system that parses sentences into a logical form expressed in a rich ontology that supports reasoning. In this paper we look at verb-particle constructions (VPCs), and the extent to which they can be treated compositionally vs idiomatically. First we distinguish between the different types of VPCs based on their compositionality and then present a set of heuristics for classifying specific instances as compositional or not. We then identify a small set of general sense classes for particles when used compositionally and discuss the resulting lexical representations that are being added to the lexicon. By treating VPCs as compositional whenever possible, we attain broad coverage in a compact way, and also enable interpretations of novel VPC usages not explicitly present in the lexicon.
Anthology ID:
W17-1719
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2017)
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Stella Markantonatou, Carlos Ramisch, Agata Savary, Veronika Vincze
Venue:
MWE
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
139–148
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1719
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-1719
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Archna Bhatia, Choh Man Teng, and James Allen. 2017. Compositionality in Verb-Particle Constructions. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2017), pages 139–148, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Compositionality in Verb-Particle Constructions (Bhatia et al., MWE 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-1719.pdf