Corpus-Based acquisition of support verb constructions for portuguese

We present a resource-poor approach to automatically acquire Support Verb Constructions (SVCs) for European Portuguese with a two-stage procedure. First, we apply a cross-lingual approach with a bilingual parallel corpus: starting with a Portuguese full verb, we use the translations into another language and the corresponding backtranslations to identify Portuguese verb-noun pairs with the same meaning. Since not all of these are SVCs, the candidates are ranked and filtered in a second, monolingual step based on association statistics. We discuss two parametrisations of our procedure for a high-precision and a high-recall setting. In our experiments, these parametrisations achieve a maximum precision of 91% and a maximum recall of 86%, respectively.