Death and Lightness: Using a Demographic Model to Find Support Verbs

TL;DR

This paper develops a demographic-inspired model to identify support verbs in language, aiming to disambiguate verbs based on their support status for nouns, with potential applications in natural language understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model inspired by demographic concepts to detect support verbs and disambiguate verb meanings in context.

Findings

The basic model provides a standard for comparison.

The complex model shows improved accuracy in identifying support verbs.

Results support the validity of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Some verbs have a particular kind of binary ambiguity: they can carry their normal, full meaning, or they can be merely acting as a prop for the nominal object. It has been suggested that there is a detectable pattern in the relationship between a verb acting as a prop (a \term{support verb}) and the noun it supports. The task this paper undertakes is to develop a model which identifies the support verb for a particular noun, and by extension, when nouns are enumerated, a model which disambiguates a verb with respect to its support status. The paper sets up a basic model as a standard for comparison; it then proposes a more complex model, and gives some results to support the model's validity, comparing it with other similar approaches.