arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Light or Full Verb? A Minimal-Pair Dataset for Probing Phraseological Competence in Language Models

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2606.05087 (cs)
[Submitted on 3 Jun 2026]

Title:Light or Full Verb? A Minimal-Pair Dataset for Probing Phraseological Competence in Language Models

View a PDF of the paper titled Light or Full Verb? A Minimal-Pair Dataset for Probing Phraseological Competence in Language Models, by Francesca Franzon and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Frequent English verbs such as 'have' and 'make' can function either as collocates in light-verb constructions or as full lexical predicates, as in 'make a decision' vs. 'make a cake'. Whether language models represent this distinction remains unclear. We introduce a large-scale controlled dataset of minimally varying English sentence series in which the same context contains the same verb in light-verb and full-verb uses. Two probing experiments show that language models differentiate between these uses even in minimal contexts and exhibit separable patterns across object types. We release the dataset, generation code, and materials as a reusable resource. The framework supports extensions to broader contexts, additional verbs, and other languages.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.05087 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2606.05087v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05087
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Francesca Franzon [view email]
[v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 16:51:27 UTC (533 KB)
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