Extending corpus-based identification of light verb constr uctions using a supervised learning framework

Light verb constructions (LVCs), such as "make a call" in English, can be said to be complex predicates in which the verb plays only a functional role. LVCs pose challenges for natural language un- derstanding, as their semantics differ from usual predicate structures. We extend the existing corpus-based measures for iden- tifying LVCs between verb-object pairs in English, by proposing using new fea- tures that use mutual information and as- sess other syntactic properties. Our work also incorporates both existing and new LVC features into a machine learning ap- proach. We experimentally show that us- ing the proposed framework incorporat- ing all features outperforms previous work by 17%. As machine learning techniques model the trends found in training data, we believe the proposed LVC detection framework and statistical features is easily extendable to other languages.