An Expert Lexicon Approach to Identifying English Phrasal Verbs

Phrasal Verbs are an important feature of the English language. Properly identifying them provides the basis for an English parser to decode the related structures. Phrasal verbs have been a challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP) because they sit at the borderline between lexicon and syntax. Traditional NLP frameworks that separate the lexicon module from the parser make it difficult to handle this problem properly. This paper presents a finite state approach that integrates a phrasal verb expert lexicon between shallow parsing and deep parsing to handle morpho-syntactic interaction. With precision/recall combined performance benchmarked consistently at 95.8%-97.5%, the Phrasal Verb identification problem has basically been solved with the presented method.