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A Canonical Form for Flexible Multiword Expressions

Summary

Flexible multiword expressions (MWEs) are hard to describe and search for. Their parts can inflect, appear in different orders and be separated by other words. Dutch has had no precisely defined canonical form for them, and the authors say no other language has one either. Dictionaries usually illustrate an idiom with an example sentence, and software cannot reliably infer an expression's properties from that. Odijk and Kroon propose design principles for a canonical form: one representation that stands for all grammatical variants of an MWE and acts like a lemma or headword. Annotations can be added to it to mark how components may or may not vary in inflection, determination and modification. Most of the principles apply to any language, but some details are specified for Dutch. The authors also release DUCAME, a lexical resource with more than 11k Dutch MWEs in this format. MWE-Finder uses DUCAME's entries to generate treebank queries automatically, so flexible MWEs can be found in large corpora while respecting their syntactic structure.

Key points

  • DUCAME versions and sources: Version 3 holds over 11k canonical MWEs. It combines a reworked DuELME (about 5,000 entries) with about 6,000 new entries. The new entries come from Stoett (1923–1925), Onze Taal, the VRT website, the Lassy-Small treebank and the authors' own collection.
  • Search tooling: DUCAME is built into MWE-Finder, which runs inside GrETEL Version 5. Its queries locate potential MWE occurrences but cannot tell idiomatic from literal readings.
  • Comparison with PARSEME: PARSEME's "prototypical" and "canonical" forms for verbal MWEs allow several forms per expression. The proposal here requires exactly one.
  • Corpus-driven refinement: The entries rest mainly on native-speaker intuition. The authors plan to check them against corpus results from MWE-Finder and revise them in later releases.
  • Word order: Word order is generally treated as a matter of general grammar, not of the individual MWE. Coordination is an exception, since an MWE may fix the conjunct order, as in dames en heren ('ladies and gentlemen').

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{odijk2024canonical,
  title = {{A Canonical Form for Flexible Multiword Expressions}},
  author = {Odijk, Jan and Kroon, Martin},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.63317/4rep3z3vkn3s},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4rep3z3vkn3s}
}

References

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