Learning about phraseology from corpora: A linguistically motivated approach for Multiword Expression identification

Abstract

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) are idiosyncratic combinations of words which pose important challenges to Natural Language Processing. Some kinds of MWEs, such as verbal ones, are particularly hard to identify in corpora, due to their high degree of morphosyntactic flexibility. This paper describes a linguistically motivated method to gather detailed information about verb+noun MWEs (VNMWEs) from corpora. Although the main focus of this study is Spanish, the method is easily adaptable to other languages. Monolingual and parallel corpora are used as input, and data about the morphosyntactic variability of VNMWEs is extracted. This information is then tested in an identification task, obtaining an F score of 0.52, which is considerably higher than related work.

Helsinki-NLP at SemEval-2022 Task 2: A Feature-Based Approach to Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection

“…syntactic and/or morphological variability (Peng et al, 2014;Constant et al, 2017). In general, quantifying any variability has traditionally required obtaining frequencies of the variants from a full corpus, as done by Inurrieta et al (2020). However, as we only have a small number of examples for each idiom, these properties are not modeled in our approach.…”

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