Supervised Learning Algorithms Evaluation on Recognizing Semantic Types of Spanish Verb-Noun Collocations

The meaning of such verb-noun collocations as the wind blows, time flies, the day passes by can be generalized as ‘what is designated by the noun exists’. Likewise, the meaning of make a decision, provide support, write a letter can be generalized as ‘make what is designated by the noun’. These generalizations represent the meaning of certain groups of collocations and may be used as semantic annotation. Our objective is to evaluate the performance of some existing supervised machine learning methods on the task of annotating Spanish collocations with generalized meanings, some of which are exemplified above. The experimental results have demonstrated that supervised learning methods achieve significant accuracy allowing them to be used in high quality semantic annotation.