Automatic acquisition of knowledge about multiword predicates. Fazly, A. & Stevenson, S. In Proceedings of the 19th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC), Taipei, Taiwan, December, 2005. overview paper for an invited talk by Suzanne Stevenson
abstract   bibtex   
Human interpretation of natural language relies heavily on cognitive processes involving metaphorical and idiomatic meanings. One area of computational linguistics in which such processes play an important, but largely unaddressed, role is the determination of the properties of multiword predicates (MWPs). MWPs such as give a groan and cut taxes involve metaphorical meaning extensions of highly frequent, and highly polysemous, verbs. Tools for automatically identifying such MWPs, and extracting their lexical and syntactic properties, are crucial to the adequate treatment of text in a computational system, due to the productive nature of MWPs across many languages. This paper gives an overview of our work addressing these issues. We begin by relating linguistic properties of metaphorical uses of verbs to their distributional properties. We devise automatic methods for assessing whether a verb phrase is literal, metaphorical, or idiomatic. Since metaphorical MWPs are generally semi-productive, we also develop computational measures of their individual acceptability and of their productivity over semantically related combinations. Our results demonstrate that combining statistical approaches with linguistic information is beneficial, both for the acquisition of knowledge about metaphorical and idiomatic MWPs, and for the organization of such knowledge in a computational lexicon.
@InProceedings{	  fazly3,
  author	= {Afsaneh Fazly and Suzanne Stevenson},
  title		= {Automatic acquisition of knowledge about multiword
		  predicates},
  note		= {overview paper for an invited talk by Suzanne Stevenson},
  booktitle	= {Proceedings of the 19th Pacific Asia Conference on
		  Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC)},
  address	= {Taipei, Taiwan},
  month		= {December},
  year		= {2005},
  abstract	= {Human interpretation of natural language relies heavily on
		  cognitive processes involving metaphorical and idiomatic
		  meanings. One area of computational linguistics in which
		  such processes play an important, but largely unaddressed,
		  role is the determination of the properties of multiword
		  predicates (MWPs). MWPs such as <I>give a groan</I> and
		  <I>cut taxes</I> involve metaphorical meaning extensions of
		  highly frequent, and highly polysemous, verbs. Tools for
		  automatically identifying such MWPs, and extracting their
		  lexical and syntactic properties, are crucial to the
		  adequate treatment of text in a computational system, due
		  to the productive nature of MWPs across many languages.
		  This paper gives an overview of our work addressing these
		  issues. We begin by relating linguistic properties of
		  metaphorical uses of verbs to their distributional
		  properties. We devise automatic methods for assessing
		  whether a verb phrase is literal, metaphorical, or
		  idiomatic. Since metaphorical MWPs are generally
		  semi-productive, we also develop computational measures of
		  their individual acceptability and of their productivity
		  over semantically related combinations. Our results
		  demonstrate that combining statistical approaches with
		  linguistic information is beneficial, both for the
		  acquisition of knowledge about metaphorical and idiomatic
		  MWPs, and for the organization of such knowledge in a
		  computational lexicon.},
  download	= {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Fazly+Stevenson-2005.pdf}
}

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