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The IdiomSearch Experiment: Extracting Phraseology from a Probabilistic Network of Constructions

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Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology (EUROPHRAS 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10596))

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Abstract

This paper reports the preliminary results of an experiment carried out on a large scale for the extraction of PUs (phraseological units, also called idioms) from large web corpora in four languages (English, Spanish, French, Chinese). The use of a new algorithm based on metric clustering techniques, of optimized database storage and of interaction with users and researchers by means of a web application, made it possible to reach high precision scores for most common PUs in the four languages, while further experimentation is still necessary for establishing recall levels with long n-grams. In the meantime, the freely accessible web application makes it possible to visualize the high proportion of phraseology in the broad sense (or of formulaic language): about 30 to 60% of the newspaper articles tested in the experiments consisted of PUs. The most surprising results, however, came from Chinese: as the algorithm had to be changed for taking into account the associations between morphemes, the methodology used made it possible to partly confirm, from a statistical point of view, one of the major claims of construction grammar: the existence of a probabilistic network of constructions, from morphemes to idiomatic phrases.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The web corpora used in the IdiomSearch experiment were assembled using the WebBootCat tool provided by the Sketch Engine (http://sketchengine.co.uk), on the basis of seed words and following the methodology described in [2].

  2. 2.

    For Chinese, the corpus does not consist of 200 million Chinese characters (hans), but of 200 million Chinese words (as tokens).

  3. 3.

    IdiomSearch is accessible on the web at: http://idiomsearch.LSTI.ucl.ac.be.

  4. 4.

    The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com, 7 August 2017.

  5. 5.

    Athelstan Homepage, http://www.athel.com/cspatg.html, last accessed 2017/08/09.

  6. 6.

    The computational issue is well known: many web pages contain Unicode errors; the robot assumes that the downloaded web page is in Unicode, but the errors remain and appear in the web corpus.

  7. 7.

    shū zhōng zì yǒu huángjīn wū, A book holds a house of gold.

  8. 8.

    According to Wikipedia, English is good for 51.6% of all web pages, Spanish for 5.1%, French for 4.1%, and Chinese for 2.0%. Wikipedia homepage, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet, last accessed 2017/08/17.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université catholique de Louvain, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Jean-Pierre Colson

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  1. Jean-Pierre Colson
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Correspondence to Jean-Pierre Colson .

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  1. University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

    Ruslan Mitkov

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Colson, JP. (2017). The IdiomSearch Experiment: Extracting Phraseology from a Probabilistic Network of Constructions. In: Mitkov, R. (eds) Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology. EUROPHRAS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10596. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69805-2_2

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69805-2

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