NooJ Linguistic Resources for Paraphrase Generation of Italian Support Verb Construction

Support verb constructions are word combinations composed of a predicative noun/adjective and a semantically bleached verb (e.g., schiacciare un pisolino ‘to take a nap’, diventare ricco ‘to get rich’). Many support verb constructions can be substituted with a full verb (e.g., pisolare ‘to nap’, arricchirsi ‘to get rich’). It is argued that this substitution increases readability and facilitates machine translation. However, the substitution of the support verb construction alone does not allow paraphrasing sentences. To ensure grammaticality and preserve (as far as possible) the meaning of the source sentence, it is also necessary to restructure the sentence from both the syntactical and lexical points of view. In this paper, we propose a formal strategy to paraphrase support verb construction with full verbs. It is based on the notion of lexical function. Moreover, we developed a set of Italian linguistic resources for the NooJ software, namely a NooJ dictionary and a NooJ transformational grammar. They perform automatic paraphrase generation of Italian support-verb sentences.