Discarding Noise in an Automatically Acquired Lexicon of Support verb Constructions.

We applied data-driven methods to carry out automatic acquisition of Dutch prepositional support verb constructions (SVCs) in corpora (e.g., iets in de gaten houden (“keep an eye on something”)). This paper addresses the question whether linguistic diagnostics help to discard noise from thenbest lists and how to (semi-)automatically apply such linguistic diagnostics to parsed corpora. We show that some of the linguistic diagnostics proposed in Hollebrandse (1993) effectively identify SVCs and contribute a modest error rate decrease.