Corpus-based Method for Automatic Identification of Support Verbs for Nominalizations

Nominalization is a highly productive phenomena in most languages. The process of nominalization ejects a verb from its syntactic role into a nominal position. The original verb is often replaced by a semantically emptied support verb (e.g., make a proposal). The choice of a support verb for a given nominalization is unpredictable, causing a problem for language learners as well as for natural language processing systems. We present here a method of discovering support verbs from an untagged corpus via low-level syntactic processing and comparison of arguments attached to verbal forms and potential nominalized forms. The result of the process is a list of potential support verbs for the nominalized form of a given predicate.