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A Hebrew verb–complement dictionary

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Abstract

We present a verb–complement dictionary of Modern Hebrew, automatically extracted from text corpora. Carefully examining a large set of examples, we defined ten types of verb complements that cover the vast majority of the occurrences of verb complements in the corpora. We explored several collocation measures as indicators of the strength of the association between the verb and its complement. We then used these measures to automatically extract verb complements from corpora. The result is a wide-coverage, accurate dictionary that lists not only the likely complements for each verb, but also the likelihood of each complement. We evaluated the quality of the extracted dictionary both intrinsically and extrinsically. Intrinsically, we showed high precision and recall on randomly (but systematically) selected verbs. Extrinsically, we showed that using the extracted information is beneficial for two applications, prepositional phrase attachment disambiguation and Arabic-to-Hebrew machine translation.

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Notes

  1. For readability, we use a straight-forward, one-to-one transliteration of Hebrew in which the letters, in traditional Hebrew alphabetic order, are represented by abgdhwzxTiklmnsypcqršt.

  2. Different binyanim (verb patterns) constitute different lemmas.

  3. Under ‘Lexicons’, at http://www.mila.cs.technion.ac.il.

  4. Since we did not use a parser to determine the PPs to be attached, we are immune in this experiment to the criticism of Atterer and Schütze (2007), whereby using an “oracle” distorts the actual performance of the attachment module.

  5. This experiment was reported in Shilon et al. (2012a).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (Grants No. 1269/07, 505/11). We are grateful to Reshef Shilon for his help with the machine translation experiments, and to Yoav Goldberg for his help with the Hebrew parser. Thanks are also due to Kayla Jacobs for several useful comments. We benefitted greatly from the constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Hanna Fadida & Alon Itai

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Shuly Wintner

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Fadida, H., Itai, A. & Wintner, S. A Hebrew verb–complement dictionary. Lang Resources & Evaluation 48, 249–278 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-013-9259-7

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