Picking them up and Figuring them out: Verb-Particle Constructions, Noise and Idiomaticity

This paper investigates, in a first stage, some methods for the automatic acquisition of verb-particle constructions (VPCs) taking into account their statistical properties and some regular patterns found in productive combinations of verbs and particles. Given the limited coverage provided by lexical resources, such as dictionaries, and the constantly growing number of VPCs, possible ways of automatically identifying them are crucial for any NLP task that requires some degree of semantic interpretation. In a second stage we also study whether the combination of statistical and linguistic properties can provide some indication of the degree of idiomaticity of a given VPC. The results obtained show that such combination can successfully be used to detect VPCs and distinguish idiomatic from compositional cases.