Alignment-based extraction of multiword expressions

Byline: Helena Medeiros Caseli (1), Carlos Ramisch (2), Maria Gracas Volpe Nunes (3), Aline Villavicencio (2,4) Keywords: Automatic identification; Word alignment; Machine translation; Terminology; Multiword expressions; Lexical acquisition; Statistical methods 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. Author Affiliation: (1) NILC, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Sao Carlos, Brazil (2) Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (3) NILC, ICMC, University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos, Brazil (4) Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, UK Article History: Registration Date: 17/07/2009 Received Date: 20/11/2007 Accepted Date: 14/07/2009 Online Date: 14/08/2009