Discovering and organizing noun-verb collocations in specialized corpora using inductive logic programming

This article presents a method for discovering and organizing noun-verb (N-V) combinations found in a French corpus on computing. Our aim is to find N-V combinations in which verbs convey a “realization meaning” as defined in the framework of lexical functions (Mel’čuk 1996, 1998). Our approach, chiefly corpus-based, uses a machine learning technique, namely Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). The whole acquisition process is divided into three steps: (1) isolating contexts in which specific N-V pairs occur; (2) inferring linguistically-motivated rules that reflect the behaviour of realization N-V pairs; (3) projecting these rules on corpora to find other valid N-V pairs. This technique is evaluated in terms of the relevance of the rules inferred and in terms of the quality (recall and precision) of the results. Results obtained show that our approach is able to find these very specific semantic relationships (the realization N-V pairs) with very good success rates.