An Analysis of Annotation of Verb-Noun Idiomatic Combinations in a Parallel Dependency Corpus

Abstract

While working on valency lexicons for Czech and English, it was necessary to define treatment of multiword entities (MWEs) with the verb as the central lexical unit. We present a corpus-based study, concentrating on multilayer specification of verbal MWEs, their properties in Czech and English, and a comparison between the two languages using the parallel Czech-English Dependency Treebank (PCEDT).

This comparison revealed interesting differences in the use of verbal MWEs in translation (discovering that such MWEs are actually rarely translated as MWEs, at least between Czech and English) as well as some inconsistencies in their annotation.

Keywords

• analysis
• annotation
• verb
• noun
• idiomatic
• combinations
• parallel
• dependency
• corpus