<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="W06-1207">
  <Title>Classifying Particle Semantics in English Verb-Particle Constructions</Title>
  <Section position="9" start_page="51" end_page="51" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> While progress has recently been made in techniques for assessing the compositionality of VPCs, work thus far has left unaddressed the problem of determining the particular meaning of the components. We focus here on the semantic contribution of the particle--a part-of-speech whose semantic complexity and range of metaphorical meaning extensions has been largely overlooked in prior computational work. Drawing on work within cognitive linguistics, we annotate a set of 180 VPCs according to the sense class of the particle up, our experimental focus in this initial investigation. We develop features that capture linguistic properties of VPCs that are relevant to the semantics of particles, and show that they outperform linguistically uninformed word co-occurrence features, achieving around 20-30% reduction in error rate over a chance baseline. Areas of on-going work include development of a broader range of features, consideration of methods for token-based semantic determination, and creation of larger experimental datasets.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>