An evaluation of the role of statistical measures and frequency for MWE identification

Sandra Antunes, Amália Mendes


Abstract
We report on an experiment to evaluate the role of statistical association measures and frequency for the identification of MWE. We base our evaluation on a lexicon of 14.000 MWE comprising different types of word combinations: collocations, nominal compounds, light verbs + predicate, idioms, etc. These MWE were manually validated from a list of n-grams extracted from a 50 million word corpus of Portuguese (a subcorpus of the Reference Corpus of Contemporary Portuguese), using several criteria: syntactic fixedness, idiomaticity, frequency and Mutual Information measure, although no threshold was established, either in terms of group frequency or MI. We report on MWE that were selected on the basis of their syntactic and semantics properties while the MI or both the MI and the frequency show low values, which would constitute difficult cases to establish a cutting point. We analyze the MI values of the MWE selected in our gold dataset and, for some specific cases, compare these values with two other statistical measures.
Anthology ID:
L14-1135
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
4046–4051
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1197_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sandra Antunes and Amália Mendes. 2014. An evaluation of the role of statistical measures and frequency for MWE identification. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 4046–4051, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
An evaluation of the role of statistical measures and frequency for MWE identification (Antunes & Mendes, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1197_Paper.pdf