Expressions with an aspectual variant of a light verb, e.g. 'take on debt' vs. 'have debt', are frequent in texts but often difficult to classify between verbal idioms, light verb constructions or compositional phrases. We investigate the properties of such expressions with a disputed membership and propose a selection of features that determine more satisfactory boundaries between the three categories in this zone, assigning the expressions to one of them.
Frequent verbs such as 'have' and 'make' can function either as collocates in light-verb constructions or as full lexical predicates, as in 'make a decision' vs. 'make a cake'. Whether language models represent this distinction, and whether such representations vary across languages, remains unclear. We introduce a large-scale controlled dataset in English, Spanish, and French, comprising minimally varying sentence series in which the same context contains the same verb in light-verb and full-verb uses. Two probing experiments show that language models differentiate between these uses even in minimal contexts and exhibit separable patterns across object types. We release the dataset, generation code, and materials as a reusable resource. The framework supports extensions to broader contexts, additional verbs, and other languages.
Francesca Franzon, Nicolas Rosàs Gómez, Leo Wanner
Multiword expressions (MWEs) are a heterogeneous set with a glaring need for classifications. Designing a satisfactory classification involves choosing features. In the case of MWEs, many features are a priori available. Not all features are equal in terms of how reliably MWEs can be assigned to classes. Accordingly, resulting classifications may be more or less fruitful for computational use. I outline an enhanced classification. In order to increase its suitability for many languages, I use previous works taking into account various languages.
The article observes data analysis of 286 multi-word expressions (MWEs) based on 16 lexical, grammatical and other criteria described in theoretical books and papers on the notion of idiomaticity. MWEs were collected from the same theoretical sources, and a set of experts in linguistics annotated them with these categories. The distribution of categories shows that there are no absolutely idiomatic expressions. Lexical criteria seem to be the most influential; grammatical criteria are bound to certain conditions; presence of obsolete words and grammar influence ability of an MWE to be replaced with one word.
Elena Mikhalkova, Anastasiya Vishnyakova, Anastasiya Drozdova +3