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Introduction

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Multiword Expressions Acquisition

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Abstract

This book is about multiword expressions (MWEs) and their treatment in natural language processing (NLP) applications. Building computer systems capable of dealing with MWEs is a hard and open problem, due to the complex and pervasive nature of these constructions in language. This chapter is a general introduction to this exciting research topic. We motivate and illustrate the importance of MWEs through many examples in several human languages. Then, we discuss the goals and scope of the computational framework for MWE acquisition presented in this book.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Actually, many of these expressions are ambiguous, and also accept literal interpretations. For example, by the way can denote a place, like in she waits by the way. We will discuss this in Sect. 2.2.

  2. 2.

    There are no clear rules as to whether an English compound should be spelled as a single word, with a hyphen or as two words (Procter 1995). For instance, both data set and dataset are acceptable forms. An overview of noun compound processing is provided in Szpakowicz et al. (2013).

  3. 3.

    http://duolingo.com

  4. 4.

    Expert MT systems are also sometimes called rule-based MT systems.

  5. 5.

    Also sometimes called empirical MT systems.

  6. 6.

    A list of similar expressions in other languages is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raining_animals

  7. 7.

    Extracted from the extended list of translation examples, see Appendix A.

  8. 8.

    However, we do not deal with languages whose writing systems do not use spaces to separate words.

  9. 9.

    http://multiword.sf.net

  10. 10.

    http://mwetoolkit.sf.net

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  1. Aix Marseille University, Marseille, France

    Carlos Ramisch

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Ramisch, C. (2015). Introduction. In: Multiword Expressions Acquisition. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09207-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09207-2_1

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