Automatic Identification of Support Verbs: A Step Towards a Definition of Semantic Weight

TL;DR

This paper proposes a computational definition of semantic weight based on syntactic frequency, focusing on support verbs like 'make' and 'take', and demonstrates its effectiveness through corpus experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a new, frequency-based, computational approach to defining semantic lightness, particularly for support verbs, advancing the understanding of lexical density.

Findings

The definition effectively identifies semantically light support verbs.

Experimental results align with previous manual annotations.

Potential for extending to other word classes.

Abstract

Current definitions of notions of lexical density and semantic weight are based on the division of words into closed and open classes, and on intuition. This paper develops a computationally tractable definition of semantic weight, concentrating on what it means for a word to be semantically light; the definition involves looking at the frequency of a word in particular syntactic constructions which are indicative of lightness. Verbs such as "make" and "take", when they function as support verbs, are often considered to be semantically light. To test our definition, we carried out an experiment based on that of Grefenstette and Teufel (1995), where we automatically identify light instances of these words in a corpus; this was done by incorporating our frequency-related definition of semantic weight into a statistical approach similar to that of Grefenstette and Teufel. The results show that this is a plausible definition of semantic lightness for verbs, which can possibly be extended to defining semantic lightness for other classes of words.