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Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Yiddish

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Book cover Natural Language Processing and Information Systems (NLDB 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10859))

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Abstract

Verbal Multi-Word Expressions (VMWEs) are very common in many languages. They include among other types the following types: Verb-Particle Constructions (VPC) (e.g. get around), Light-Verb Constructions (LVC) (e.g. make a decision), and idioms (ID) (e.g. break a leg). In this paper, we present a new dataset for supervised learning of VMWEs written in Yiddish. The dataset was manually collected and annotated from a web resource. It contains a set of positive examples for VMWEs and a set of non-VMWEs examples. While the dataset can be used for training supervised algorithms, the positive examples can be used as seeds in unsupervised bootstrapping algorithms. Moreover, we analyze the lexical properties of VMWEs written in Yiddish by classifying them to six categories: VPC, LVC, ID, Inherently Pronominal Verb (IPronV), Inherently Prepositional Verb (IPrepV), and other (OTH). The analysis suggests some interesting features of VMWEs for exploration. This dataset is a first step towards automatic identification of VMWEs written in Yiddish, which is important for natural language understanding, generation and translation systems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/parseme/index.php.

  2. 2.

    Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for northern Europe and Germany.

  3. 3.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish.

  4. 4.

    https://archive.org/details/nationalyiddishbookcenter.

  5. 5.

    http://yiddish-periodicals.huji.ac.il/.

  6. 6.

    ftp://babel.ling.upenn.edu/research-material/yiddish-corpus/.

  7. 7.

    http://web-corpora.net/YNC/search/.

  8. 8.

    http://yiddish.forward.com.

  9. 9.

    To facilitate readability, we use a transliteration of Hebrew using Roman characters; the letters used, in Hebrew lexicographic order, are abgdhwzxTiklmns`pcqršt.

  10. 10.

    https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/parseme/index.php/2-general/151-parseme-shared-task-pilot-annotation.

  11. 11.

    http://proycon.github.io/folia/.

  12. 12.

    http://liebeskind-chaya.blogspot.co.il/p/downloads.html.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our deep gratitude to Gitty Eithen, Bluma Zicherman, and Hindy Golomb, our research assistants, for carrying out the annotation process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Jerusalem College of Technology, Lev Academic Center, 21 Havaad Haleumi Street, P.O.B. 16031, 9116001, Jerusalem, Israel

    Chaya Liebeskind & Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner

Authors
  1. Chaya Liebeskind
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  2. Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chaya Liebeskind .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France

    Max Silberztein

  2. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France

    Faten Atigui

  3. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France

    Elena Kornyshova

  4. Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Métais

  5. University of Salford, Manchester, United Kingdom

    Farid Meziane

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Liebeskind, C., HaCohen-Kerner, Y. (2018). Verbal Multi-Word Expressions in Yiddish. In: Silberztein, M., Atigui, F., Kornyshova, E., Métais, E., Meziane, F. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10859. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91947-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91947-8_20

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