Compositionality in Verb-Particle Constructions

Archna Bhatia, Choh Man Teng, James Allen

Abstract: We are developing a broad-coverage deep semantic lexicon for a system that parses sentences into a logical form expressed in a rich ontology that supports reasoning. In this paper we look at verb-particle con- structions (VPCs), and the extent to which they can be treated compositionally vs id- iomatically. First we distinguish between the different types of VPCs based on their compositionality and then present a set of heuristics for classifying specific instances as compositional or not. We then iden- tify a small set of general sense classes for particles when used compositionally and discuss the resulting lexical represen- tations that are being added to the lexicon. By treating VPCs as compositional when- ever possible, we attain broad coverage in a compact way, and also enable interpretations of novel VPC usages not explicitly present in the lexicon.