A Corpus-based Study of the German Recipient Passive

Ziering P, Zarrieß S, Kuhn J. A Corpus-based Study of the German Recipient Passive. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}'12). Istanbul, Turkey: European Language Resources Association (ELRA); 2012: 1637-1644.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{\%})