Distinguishing affixoid formations from compounds

摘要

We study German affixoids, a type of morpheme in between affixes and free stems. Several properties have been associated with them - increased productivity: a bleached semantics, which is often evaluative and/or intensifying and thus of relevance to sentiment analysis; and the existence of a free morpheme counterpart - but not been validated empirically. In experiments on a new data set that we make available, we put these key assumptions from the morphological literature to the test and show that despite the fact that affixoids generate many low-frequency formations. we can classify these as affixoid or non-affixoid instances with a best F1-score of 74%.