Identification of Verbal Phraseological Units in Mexican News Stories

Verbal Phraseological Units are phrases made up of two or more words in which at least one of the words is a verb that plays the role of the predicate. One of the characteristics of this type of expression is that its global meaning rarely can be deduced from the meaning of its components. The automatic recognition of this type of linguistic structures is a very important task, since they are a standard way of expressing a concept or idea. In this paper we present the results obtained when different supervised machine learning methods are employed for determining whether or not a verbal phraseological unit is present in a given story of a newspaper. The experi­ ments have been carried out using a supervised corpus of news stories (written in Mexican Spanish). Beside the results obtained in the experiments aforementioned, we provide access to a new lexicon having phrases as entries (instead of single words), in which each entry is associated to a real value (normalized between zero and one) indicating its probability of being a verbal phraseo­ logical unit.