The “jump and stay” method to discover proper verb centered constructions in corpus lattices

Abstract

The research presented here is based on the theoretical model of corpus lattices. We implemented this as an effective data structure, and developed an algorithm based on this structure to discover essential verbal expressions from corpus data. The idea behind the algorithm is the “jump and stay” principle, which tells us that our target expressions will be found at such places in the lattice where the value of a suitably defined function (whose domain is the vertex set of the corpus lattice) significantly increases (jumps) and then remains the same (stays). We evaluated our method on Hungarian data. Evaluation shows that about 75% of the obtained expressions are correct, actual errors are rare. Thus, this paper is 1. a proof of concept concerning the corpus lattice model, opening the way to investigate this structure further through our implementation; and 2. a proof of concept of the “jump and stay” idea and the algorithm itself, opening the way to apply it further, e.g. for other languages.