Go to ACL 2025 Workshop CoNLL homepageCompositionality and Event Retrieval in Complement Coercion: A Study of Language Models in a Low-resource Setting
Keywords: Language Models, Complement Coercion, Logical Metonymy, Compositionality, Lexical Semantics, Autoencoders, Autoregressive Models
TL;DR: We analyze how LMs handle complement coercion in a low-resource setting like Norwegian, evaluating output quality and the effect of compositionality on event interpretation.
Abstract: In sentences such as John began the book, the complement noun, lexically denoting an entity, is interpreted as an event. This phenomenon is known in linguistics as complement coercion: the event associated with the verb is not overtly expressed but can be recovered from the meanings of other constituents, context and world knowledge. We investigate whether language models (LMs) can exploit sentence structure and compositional meaning to recover plausible events in complement coercion. For the first time, we tested different LMs in Norwegian, a low-resource language with high syntactic variation in coercion constructions across aspectual verbs. Results reveal that LMs struggle with retrieving plausible events and with ranking them above less plausible ones. Moreover, we found that LMs do not exploit the compositional properties of coercion sentences in their predictions.
Submission Number: 191
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