Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge About Multiword Predicates

Human interpretation of natural language relies heavily on cognitive processes involving metaphorical and idiomatic meanings. One area of computational linguistics in which such processes play an important, but largely unaddressed, role is the determination of the properties of multiword predicates (MWPs). MWPs such as give a groan and cut taxes involve metaphorical meaning extensions of highly frequent, and highly polysemous, verbs. Tools for automatically identifying such MWPs, and extracting their lexical and syntactic properties, are crucial to the adequate treatment of text in a computational system, due to the productive nature of MWPs across many languages. This paper gives an overview of our work addressing these issues. We begin by relating linguistic properties of metaphorical uses of verbs to their distributional properties. We devise automatic methods for assessing whether a verb phrase is literal, metaphorical, or idiomatic. Since metaphorical MWPs are generally semi-productive, we also develop computational measures of their individual acceptability and of their productivity over semantically related combinations. Our results demonstrate that combining statistical approaches with linguistic information is beneficial, both for the acquisition of knowledge about metaphorical and idiomatic MWPs, and for the organization of such knowledge in a computational lexicon. 1. Metaphorical Multiword Predicates Metaphor is a powerful aspect of language, enabling creative expression in terms of familiar concepts, usually ones which are easily visualizable (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Johnson, 1987; Nunberg et al., 1994). Indeed, metaphor is such a central part of linguistic competence that many terms, especially multiword expressions, that are currently accepted as “regular” language have their origin in metaphorical uses (Newman, 1996). Some of these expressions are viewed as meaning extensions of their component words, which at least partly contribute their semantics, or a figurative version of their semantics. Others have become idioms with idiosyncratic semantics whose relation to their component words is not obvious (except possibly historically). In particular, it is common across languages for multiword predicates (MWPs) to form around certain high frequency verbs that easily undergo a process of metaphorization (Pauwels, 2000; Newman and Rice, 2004). In their literal uses, these so-called “basic” verbs typically refer to states or acts that are central to human experience (e.g., cut, give, put, sit). Their metaphorical uses yield a range of meaning extensions, exhibited in MWPs such as those in 1(a–d): Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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