A Corpus-based Study of the German Recipient Passive

Patrick Ziering, Sina Zarrieß, Jonas Kuhn


Abstract
In this paper, we investigate the usage of a non-canonical German passive alternation for ditransitive verbs, the recipient passive, in naturally occuring corpus data. We propose a classifier that predicts the voice of a ditransitive verb based on the contextually determined properties its arguments. As the recipient passive is a low frequent phenomenon, we first create a special data set focussing on German ditransitive verbs which are frequently used in the recipient passive. We use a broad-coverage grammar-based parser, the German LFG parser, to automatically annotate our data set for the morpho-syntactic properties of the involved predicate arguments. We train a Maximum Entropy classifier on the automatically annotated sentences and achieve an accuracy of 98.05%, clearly outperforming the baseline that always predicts active voice baseline (94.6%).
Anthology ID:
L12-1144
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1637–1644
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/311_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrick Ziering, Sina Zarrieß, and Jonas Kuhn. 2012. A Corpus-based Study of the German Recipient Passive. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1637–1644, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Corpus-based Study of the German Recipient Passive (Ziering et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/311_Paper.pdf