Extending Corpus-Based Identification Of Light Verb Constructions Using A Supervised Learning Framework

Light verb constructions (LVCs), such as “make a call” in English, can be said to be complex predicates in which the verb plays only a functional role. LVCs pose challenges for natural language understanding, as their semantics differ from usual predicate structures. We extend the existing corpus-based measures for identifying LVCs between verb-object pairs in English, by proposing using new features that use mutual information and assess other syntactic properties. Our work also incorporates both existing and new LVC features into a machine learning approach. We experimentally show that using the proposed framework incorporating all features outperforms previous work by 17%. As machine learning techniques model the trends found in training data, we believe the proposed LVC detection framework and statistical features is easily extendable to other languages.