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Alignment-based extraction of multiword expressions

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Abstract

Due to idiosyncrasies in their syntax, semantics or frequency, Multiword Expressions (MWEs) have received special attention from the NLP community, as the methods and techniques developed for the treatment of simplex words are not necessarily suitable for them. This is certainly the case for the automatic acquisition of MWEs from corpora. A lot of effort has been directed to the task of automatically identifying them, with considerable success. In this paper, we propose an approach for the identification of MWEs in a multilingual context, as a by-product of a word alignment process, that not only deals with the identification of possible MWE candidates, but also associates some multiword expressions with semantics. The results obtained indicate the feasibility and low costs in terms of tools and resources demanded by this approach, which could, for example, facilitate and speed up lexicographic work.

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Notes

  1. Pesquisa FAPESP is available at http://www.revistapesquisa.fapesp.br.

  2. Apertium is an open-source machine translation engine and toolbox available at: http://www.apertium.org.

  3. http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~unitex/.

  4. For example: “artesian wells”, “black hole” and “botanical gardens” are found in CIDE, “clean up”, “consist of” and “depend on” are found in CIDPV.

  5. Evert and Krenn (2005) give a detailed description of standard measures and their application to MWE identification, and more material may also be found on http://www.collocations.de.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the financial support of the Brazilian agencies FAPESP (02/13207-8) CNPq (550388/2005-2), SEBRAE/FINEP (1194/07) and CAPES (CAPES/COFECUB 548/07). We also thank Mônica Saddy Martins for helping in the evaluation process, and the anonymous reviewers for the useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NILC, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of São Carlos, São Carlos, Brazil

    Helena Medeiros de Caseli

  2. Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Carlos Ramisch & Aline Villavicencio

  3. NILC, ICMC, University of São Paulo, São Carlos, Brazil

    Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK

    Aline Villavicencio

Authors
  1. Helena Medeiros de Caseli
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  2. Carlos Ramisch
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  3. Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes
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  4. Aline Villavicencio
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Correspondence to Aline Villavicencio.

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de Caseli, H.M., Ramisch, C., das Graças Volpe Nunes, M. et al. Alignment-based extraction of multiword expressions. Lang Resources & Evaluation 44, 59–77 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9097-9

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