Paraphrasing of Italian Support Verb Constructions based on Lexical and Grammatical Resources

Support verb constructions (SVC), are verb-noun complexes which play a role in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as Machine Translation (MT). They can be paraphrased with a full verb, preserving its meaning, improving at the same time the MT raw output. In this paper, we discuss the creation of linguistic resources namely a set of dictionaries and rules that can identify and paraphrase Italian SVCs. We propose a paraphrasing computational method that is based on open-source tools and data such as NooJ linguistic environment and OpenLogos MT system. We focus on pre-processing the data that will be machine translated, but our methodology can also be applied in other fields in NLP. Our results show that linguistic knowledge constitutes a 95.5 % precision rate in identifying SVC and an 88.8 % precision rate in paraphrasing SVCs into full verbs.