As the study of language has shifted over the past 20 years from a focus on abstract knowledge of language to a focus on actual language use, there's been increasing awareness that much of what people say does not fall neatly into the traditional model of grammar that separates syntax and the lexicon. In response, there's been significant work on elements of language that used to be relegated to "the periphery", including multiword lexemes (collocations, idioms, multiword verbs of various kinds) that exhibit properties of both single words and syntactic phrases. Moreover, theories of child language learning have explored the importance of multiword constructions in guiding the acquisition process. However, computational modeling of child language acquisition has continued to focus largely on word learning and grammar learning. In this talk, I will present our computational linguistic research on identifying and classifying multiword verbs, and discuss preliminary work relating these techniques to the process of child language acquisition.
This is joint work with Afsaneh Fazly, University of Toronto.