Mining Complex Predicates In Hindi Using A Parallel Hindi-English Corpus

Complex predicate is a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb followed by a light verb that behaves as a single unit of verb. Complex predicates (CPs) are abundantly used in Hindi and other languages of Indo Aryan family. Detecting and interpreting CPs constitute an important and somewhat a difficult task. The linguistic and statistical methods have yielded limited success in mining this data. In this paper, we present a simple method for detecting CPs of all kinds using a Hindi-English parallel corpus. A CP is hypothesized by detecting absence of the conventional meaning of the light verb in the aligned English sentence. This simple strategy exploits the fact that CP is a multiword expression with a meaning that is distinct from the meaning of the light verb. Although there are several shortcomings in the methodology, this empirical method surprisingly yields mining of CPs with an average precision of 89% and a recall of 90%.