Towards Identifying Hindi/Urdu Noun Templates in Support of a Large-Scale LFG Grammar

Abstract

Complex predicates (CPs) are a highly productive predicational phenomenon in Hindi and Urdu and present a challenge for deep syntactic parsing. For CPs, a combination of a noun and light verb express a single event. The combinatorial preferences of nouns with one (or more) light verb is useful for predicting an instance of a CP. In this paper, we present a semi-automatic method to obtain noun groups based on their co-occurrences with light verbs. These noun groups represent the likelihood of a particular noun-verb combination in a large corpus. Finally, in order to encode this in an LFG grammar, we propose linking nouns with templates that describe preferable combinations with light verbs.

Syntactic composition and selectional preferences in Hindi Light Verb Constructions

“…Simi-lar observations have been made for English (Barrett andDavis, 2003, North, 2005). Sulger and Vaidya (2014) found that nouns in Hindi preferentially occur with a particular light verb based on their ontological properties (extracted from Hindi WordNet (Bhattacharyya, 2010)). For example, the noun varsha 'rain' has the ontological node description in Hindi WordNet as 'Natural State,State,Noun' and has a high likelihood of occurring with a light verb that is also marked for stativity e.g.…”

“…These combinatorial constraints also suggest that it is not useful to think of the light verb merely as a licensor of predication, as it also contributes semantic information to the LVC. Sulger and Vaidya (2014) were able to identify five ontological properties that governed combinatorial constraints on noun and light verbs: agentive, stative, transfer, divisible and punctive. Each of these were associated with the light verbs kar 'do', hu-'become', de 'give', le 'take' and lag 'get' respectively.…”