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Using Noun Similarity to Adapt an Acceptability Measure for Persian Light Verb Constructions

Light verb constructions (LVCs), such as take a walk and make a decision, are a common subclass of multiword expressions (MWEs), whose distinct syntactic and semantic properties call for a special treatment within a computational system. In particular, LVCs are formed semi-productively: often a semantically-general verb (such as take) combines with a number of semantically-similar nouns to form semantically-related LVCs, as in make a decision/choice/commitment. Nonetheless, there are restrictions as to which verbs combine with which class of nouns. A proper computational account of LVCs is even more important for languages such as Persian, in which most verbs are of the form of LVCs. Recently, there has been some work on the automatic identification of MWEs (including LVCs) in resource-rich languages, such as English and Dutch. We adapt such existing techniques for the automatic identification of LVCs in Persian, an under-resourced language. Specifically, we extend an existing statistical measure of the acceptability of English LVCs (Fazly et al., 2007) to make explicit use of semantic classes of noun, and show that such classes are in particular useful for determining the LVC acceptability of new combinations.