A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical

Acquisition of English Verb-Particle

Constructions
Timothy Baldwin
1 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
The Long and the Short of MWEs
MWEs crop up all over the place, MWEs are a pain to
encode, MWEs come and go ... MWEs kick arse!
Need to take a shot at standardisation of MWE
resources/evaluation
Particular MWE type in the spotlight:
English Verb Particle Constructions (VPCs)
LREC 2008
2 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Verb-particle Constructions (VPCs)
VPC = verb + obligatory particle(s)
intransitive:
Kim calmed down
transitive:
Kim handed in the paper
Kim handed the paper in
Kim gets Sandy down
LREC 2008
3 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Linguistic Properties of VPCs
Transitive VPCs undergo the particle alternation:
hand in the paper vs. hand the paper in
With transitive VPCs, pronominal objects must be
expressed in the split conguration:
hand it in vs. *hand in it
Villavicencio and Copestake, 2002, Huddleston and Pullum, 2002 LREC 2008
4 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Manner adverbs (generally) cannot occur between the
verb and particle:
*hand it promptly in
Villavicencio and Copestake, 2002, Huddleston and Pullum, 2002 LREC 2008
5 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
VPCs and Compositionality
Particles in VPCs occurs with diering levels of
compositionality:
idiomatic (non-compositional):
Kim messed the party up
aspectual (compositional):
Kim ate her dinner up
locative (compositional):
Kim moved the picture up
Bolinger, 1971, Cook and Stevenson, 2006 LREC 2008
5 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
VPCs and Compositionality
Particles in VPCs occurs with diering levels of
compositionality:
idiomatic (non-compositional):
Kim messed the party up
aspectual (compositional):
Kim ate her dinner up
locative (compositional):
Kim moved the picture up
Bolinger, 1971, Cook and Stevenson, 2006 LREC 2008
6 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Task Denition
For a xed set {V, P, S} (V = verb, P =
(prepositional) particle and S = valence), classify each
V, P, S as a non-compositional VPC relative to a set
V, P, S
C
of up to 50 candidate sentences
Total of 2898 unique VPC candidates:
2060 intransitive VPC candidates
2030 transitive VPC candidates
LREC 2008
7 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Task Denition: Example
V, P, S = mess, up, trans
V, P, S
C
:
They re all messed up together in a bowl .
It messed up everything .
I d mess things up on me own .
How badly have I messed up your life ?
An wipe that mess up , Mum snapped at me .
That still messes me up on the guitar .
.
.
.
LREC 2008
8 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Task Denition: Example
V, P, S = mess, up, intrans
V, P, S
C
:
As I said , the mud has messed up my mind .
It also messed up some of my data files .
Why did nt you come to me when you were so messed up ?
That s one more thing that Eleanor s messed up .
Why had nt Corbett cleared this mess up ?
.
.
.
LREC 2008
9 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Corpus
Candidate sentences taken from Baldwin, 2005, where
VPC token instances were identied in the written
portion of the BNC by:
POS tag templates
chunk templates
chunk grammar
dependency-based templates
Rank instances by weighted voting
Baldwin, 2005 LREC 2008
10 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Data Cleansing
An annotator was presented with the token instances
for a given V, P, S and asked to identify those (non-
compositional) instances which should be included in
the lexicon of the English Resource Grammar
This data was further post-pruned by the grammar
writer
Baldwin, 2005 LREC 2008
11 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
Summary
New MWE dataset for standardised evaluation of
English VPC extraction, including:
compositionality
valence
Baldwin, 2005 LREC 2008
12 A Resource for Evaluating the Deep Lexical Acquisition of English VPCs
References
Baldwin, T. (2005). The deep lexical acquisition of English verb-particle constructions. Computer
Speech and Language, Special Issue on Multiword Expressions, 19(4):398414.
Bolinger, D. (1971). The Phrasal Verb in English. Harvard University Press, Harvard, USA.
Cook, P. and Stevenson, S. (2006). Classifying particle semantics in english verb-particle
constructions. In Proc. of the COLING/ACL 2006 Workshop on Multiword Expressions:
Identifying and Exploiting Underlying Properties, pages 4553, Sydney, Australia.
Huddleston, R. and Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Villavicencio, A. and Copestake, A. (2002). Verb-particle constructions in a computational grammar
of English. In Proc. of the 9th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar (HPSG-2002), Seoul, Korea.
Baldwin, 2005 LREC 2008