Mapping the Perfect via Translation Mining

Martijn van der Klis, Bert Le Bruyn, Henriëtte de Swart


Abstract
Semantic analyses of the Perfect often defeat their own purpose: by restricting their attention to ‘real’ perfects (like the English one), they implicitly assume the Perfect has predefined meanings and usages. We turn the tables and focus on form, using data extracted from multilingual parallel corpora to automatically generate semantic maps (Haspelmath, 1997) of the sequence ‘Have/Be + past participle’ in five European languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Dutch). This technique, which we dub Translation Mining, has been applied before in the lexical domain (Wälchli and Cysouw, 2012) but we showcase its application at the level of the grammar.
Anthology ID:
E17-2080
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
497–502
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2080
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Martijn van der Klis, Bert Le Bruyn, and Henriëtte de Swart. 2017. Mapping the Perfect via Translation Mining. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 497–502, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mapping the Perfect via Translation Mining (van der Klis et al., EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/E17-2080.pdf