Integrating Verb-Particle Constructions into CCG Parsing

Despite their prevalence in the English language, multiword expressions like verb-particle constructions (VPCs) are often poorly handled by NLP systems. This problem is partly due to inadequacies in existing corpora; the primary corpus for CCG-oriented work, CCGbank, does not account for VPCs at all, and is inconsistent in its handling of them. In this paper, we apply some corrective transformations to CCGbank, and then use it to retrain an augmented version of the Clark and Curran CCG parser. Using our technique, we observe no significant change in F-score, while the resulting parse is semantically more sound.