Automatic identification of persian light verb constructions

Multiword expressions pose a challenge to the development of large-scale, semantically-rich Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. We use a bilingual parallel corpus for automatically extracting Light Verb Constructions (LVCs), a very common type of multiword expressions in many languages, including Persian. Using two classifiers, we investigate the usefulness of seven linguistically-informed features for automatically identifying Persian LVCs. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt at the automatic detection of a broad class of Persian LVCs. Results of our experiments show that the proposed features are reasonably successful at the task.