Multi-Verb Constructions - Parsing with a Deterministic Finite State Automaton
Kalyanamalini Sahoo
International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2016.
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Abstract:
This article discusses the parsing of multi-verb constructions in the Indic language Odia, in a Deterministic
Finite State Automaton (DFA). It deals with two verb (V-v) sequences, and in the case of passivization, 3 verb sequences.
These V-v sequences are formed by combining a main verb and a fully or partially bleached â€˜lightâ€™ verb; where the main
verb carries the lexical semantic information; the Tense, Aspect, Mode marking occurs on the light verb; and the sequence
as a whole determines the argument structure. Although both the verbs in the V-v sequences are form-identical with a
main verb in the language, the second one is a light verb because of its semantic and grammatical bleaching. The verbs
cannot change their position, and are always spelled as a single word. Such double positional slots for the verbs pose
constraint for the processing of the string by DFA, as it would be different from a standardly accepted single verb string.
Moreover, both the verbs vary in their grammatical and semantic functions, and hence, choose a particular type of verb
to co-occur with. This paper proposes the parsing of such multi-verb constructions in a DFA. Such morphological parsing
is new in Odia and can be used in various applications like morphological analyzer, spell-checker, machine translation,
information retrieval, etc.