A Lexical Resource of Hebrew Verb-Noun Multi-Word Expressions

A verb-noun Multi-Word Expression (MWE) is a combination of a verb and a noun with or without other words, in which the combination has a meaning different from the meaning of the words considered separately. In this paper, we present a new lexical resource of Hebrew Verb-Noun MWEs (VN-MWEs). The VN-MWEs of this resource were manually collected and annotated from five different web resources. In addition, we analyze the lexical properties of Hebrew VN-MWEs by classifying them to three types: morphological, syntactic, and semantic. These two contributions are essential for designing algorithms for automatic VN-MWEs extraction. The analysis suggests some interesting features of VN-MWEs for exploration. The lexical resource enables to sample a set of positive examples for Hebrew VN-MWEs. This set of examples can either be used for training supervised algorithms or as seeds in unsupervised bootstrapping algorithms. Thus, this resource is a first step towards automatic identification of Hebrew VN-MWEs, which is important for natural language understanding, generation and translation systems.