Dependency Parsing for Identifying Hungarian Light Verb Constructions

Light verb constructions (LVCs) are verb and noun combinations in which the verb has lost its meaning to some degree and the noun is used in one of its original senses. They often share their syntactic pattern with other constructions (e.g. verbobject pairs) thus LVC detection can be viewed as classifying certain syntactic patterns as light verb constructions or not. In this paper, we explore a novel way to detect LVCs in texts: we apply a dependency parser to carry out the task. We present our experiments on a Hungarian treebank, which has been manually annotated for dependency relations and light verb constructions. Our results outperformed those achieved by state-of-the-art techniques for Hungarian LVC detection, especially due to the high precision and the treatment of long-distance dependencies.