MWEs in Treebanks: From Survey to Guidelines

Victoria Rosén, Koenraad De Smedt, Gyri Smørdal Losnegaard, Eduard Bejček, Agata Savary, Petya Osenova

Abstract
By means of an online survey, we have investigated ways in which various types of multiword expressions are annotated in existing treebanks. The results indicate that there is considerable variation in treatments across treebanks and thereby also, to some extent, across languages and across theoretical frameworks. The comparison is focused on the annotation of light verb constructions and verbal idioms. The survey shows that the light verb constructions either get special annotations as such, or are treated as ordinary verbs, while VP idioms are handled through different strategies. Based on insights from our investigation, we propose some general guidelines for annotating multiword expressions in treebanks. The recommendations address the following application-based needs: distinguishing MWEs from similar but compositional constructions; searching distinct types of MWEs in treebanks; awareness of literal and nonliteral meanings; and normalization of the MWE representation. The cross-lingually and cross-theoretically focused survey is intended as an aid to accessing treebanks and an aid for further work on treebank annotation.
Anthology ID:
L16-1368
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2323–2330
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1368
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Victoria Rosén, Koenraad De Smedt, Gyri Smørdal Losnegaard, Eduard Bejček, Agata Savary, and Petya Osenova. 2016. MWEs in Treebanks: From Survey to Guidelines. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2323–2330, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
MWEs in Treebanks: From Survey to Guidelines (Rosén et al., LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/L16-1368.pdf
PDF Search