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<Paper uid="W06-1207">
  <Title>Classifying Particle Semantics in English Verb-Particle Constructions</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="51" end_page="51" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Related Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The semantic compositionality of VPC types has recently received increasing attention. McCarthy et al. (2003) use several measures to automatically rate the overall compositionality of a VPC. Bannard (2005), extending work by Bannard et al.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (2003), instead considers the extent to which the verb and particle each contribute semantically to the VPC. In contrast, our work assumes that the particle of every VPC contributes compositionally to its meaning. We draw on cognitive linguistic analysis that posits a rich set of literal and metaphorical meaning possibilities of a particle, which has been previously overlooked in computational work on VPCs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this first investigation of particle meaning in VPCs, we choose to focus on type-based classification, partly due to the significant extra expense of manually annotating sufficient numbers of tokens in text. As noted earlier, though, VPCs can take on different meanings, indicating a shortcoming of type-based work. Patrick and Fletcher (2005) classify VPC tokens, considering each as compositional, non-compositional or not a VPC.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Again, however, it is important to recognize which of the possible meaning components is being contributed. In this vein, Uchiyama et al. (2005) tackle token classification of Japanese compound verbs (similar to VPCs) as aspectual, spatial, or adverbial. In the future, we aim to extend the scope of our work, to determine the meaning of a particle in a VPC token, along the lines of our sense classes here. This will almost certainly require semantic classification of the verb token (Lapata and Brew, 2004), similar to our approach here of using the semantic class of a verb type as indicative of the meaning of a particle type.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Particle semantics has clear relations to preposition semantics. Some research has focused on the sense disambiguation of specific prepositions (e.g., Alam, 2004), while other work has classified preposition tokens according to their semantic role (O'Hara and Wiebe, 2003). Moreover, two large lexical resources of preposition senses are currently under construction, The Preposition Project (Litkowski, 2005) and PrepNet (Saint-Dizier, 2005). These resources were not suitable as the basis for our sense classes because they do not address the range of metaphorical extensions that a preposition/particle can take on, but future work may enable larger scale studies of the type needed to adequately address VPC semantics.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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