Mathilde Deletombe


2026

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are good examples of a phenomenon where identification systems struggle with generalisation: MWE present in the test set but absent in the training set are rarely identified. This raises the question of the diversity of the test set, relative to that of the train set, and how this impacts performance. We set out to measure how much diversity of a train corpus increases when adding individual MWEs from the test corpus, and how this increase impacts MWE identification performance. We measure diversity across a three-dimension framework and find mostly consistent negative correlations with performance in 14 languages and 8 systems.