A Framework for Automatic Acquisition of Croatian and Serbian Verb Aspect from Corpora

Verb aspect is a grammatical and lexical category that encodes temporal unfolding and duration of events described by verbs. It is a potentially interesting source of information for various computational tasks, but has so far not been studied in much depth from the perspective of automatic processing. Slavic languages are particularly interesting in this respect, as they encode aspect through complex and not entirely consistent lexical derivations involving prefixation and suffixation. Focusing on Croatian and Serbian, in this paper we propose a novel framework for automatic classification of their verb types into a number of fine-grained aspectual classes based on the observable morphology of verb forms. In addition, we provide a set of around 2000 verbs classified based on our framework. This set can be used for linguistic research as well as for testing automatic classification on a larger scale. With minor adjustments the approach is also applicable to other Slavic languages.