A Preliminary Study of Disambiguating VO- and VN-Constructions Using Selection Preferences

In Chinese, a verb followed by a noun can be analyzed as either a verb-object (VO) construction or a verb-noun (VN) construction. In the latter, the verb acts as a modifier of the noun. This paper describes how selection preferences can be used to determine whether a Verb+Noun pair (V+N) is a VO-construction or a VN-construction. The approach also takes syntactic factors into consideration. These factors are expresssed in terms of likelihood measures of the tendency of verbs and nouns functioning as VN- and VO-constructions. The preliminary result based on 17 bi-syllabic, transitive verbs with a total of 880 V+N pairs is 88.4%.