Semantic representation of english phrasal verbs

Multi-word expressions present a number of problems for natural language processing, most notably due to the non-compositional nature of their meaning. The pervasiveness of phrasal verbs in texts makes their acquisition a necessary task, and successful approaches to phrasal verb acquisition display exemplary potential to solve many issues related to multi-word expressions in NLP. We describe an ontological semantic approach to the manual lexical acquisition of phrasal verbs for a natural language database. This paper demonstrates the practical issues and tradeoffs associated with phrasal verb acquisition.