Assessing Meaning Components in German Complex Verbs: A Collection of Source-Target Domains and Directionality

Proceedings of the 7th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), pages 22–32 New Orleans, June 5-6, 2018. c⃝2018 Association for Computational Linguistics Assessing Meaning Components in German Complex Verbs: A Collection of Source–Target Domains and Directionality Sabine Schulte im Walde and Maximilian K¨oper and Sylvia Springorum Institut f¨ur Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung Universit¨at Stuttgart, Germany {schulte,maximilian.koeper,sylvia.springorum}@ims.uni-stuttgart.de Abstract This paper presents a collection to assess meaning components in German complex verbs, which frequently undergo meaning shifts. We use a novel strategy to obtain source and target domain characterisations via sen- tence generation rather than sentence annota- tion. A selection of arrows adds spatial dir- ectional information to the generated contexts. We provide a broad qualitative description of the dataset, and a series of standard classifica- tion experiments verifies the quantitative reli- ability of the presented resource. The setup for collecting the meaning components is applic- able also to other languages, regarding com- plex verbs as well as other language-specific targets that involve meaning shifts. 1 Introduction German particle verbs (PVs) are complex verb structures such as anstrahlen ‘to beam/smile at’ that combine a prefix particle (an) with a base verb (strahlen ‘to beam’). PVs represent a type of multi-word expressions, which are generally known as a “pain in the neck for NLP” (Sag et al., 2002). Even more, German PVs pose a specific challenge for NLP tasks and applications, because the particles are highly ambiguous; e.g., the particle an has a partitive meaning in anbeißen ’to take a bite’, a cumulative meaning in anh¨aufen ’to pile up’, and a topological meaning in an- binden ’to tie to’ (Springorum, 2011). In addi- tion, they often trigger meaning shifts of the base verbs (BVs), cf. Springorum et al. (2013); e.g., the PV abschminken with the BV schminken ’to put on make-up’ has a literal meaning (’to remove make-up’) and a shifted, non-literal meaning (’to forget about something’).1 1We deliberately make use of the general term “meaning shift” in comparison to specific instances such as metaphor With PVs representing a large and challen- ging class in the lexicon, their meaning com- ponents and their mechanisms of compositional- ity have received a considerable amount of in- terdisciplinary research interest. For example, a series of formal-semantic analyses manually clas- sified German PVs (with particles ab, an, auf, nach) into soft semantic classes (Lechler and Roßdeutscher, 2009; Haselbach, 2011; Kliche, 2011; Springorum, 2011). Corpus studies and an- notations demonstrated the potential of German PVs to appear in non-literal language usage, and to trigger meaning shifts (Springorum et al., 2013; K¨oper and Schulte im Walde, 2016b). Regard- ing computational models, the majority of exist- ing approaches to PV meaning addressed the auto- matic prediction of German PV compositionality (Salehi et al., 2014; Bott and Schulte im Walde, 2015; K¨oper and Schulte im Walde, 2017b), in a similar vein as computational approaches for Eng- lish PVs (Baldwin et al., 2003; Bannard, 2005; McCarthy et al., 2003; Kim and Baldwin, 2007; Salehi and Cook, 2013; Salehi et al., 2014). Only …

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