This paper highlights the importance of integrating MWE identification with the development of syntactic MWE lexicons. It suggests that lexicons with minimal morphosyntactic information can amplify current MWE-annotated datasets and refine identification strategies. To our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to focus on both seen and unseen of VMWEs for Arabic. It also deals with the challenge of differentiating between literal and figurative interpretations of idiomatic expressions. The approach involves a dual-phase procedure: first projecting a VMWE lexicon onto a corpus to identify candidate occurrences, then disambiguating these occurrences to distinguish idiomatic from literal instances. Experiments outlined in the paper aim to assess the efficacy of this technique, utilizing a lexicon known as LEXAR and the “parseme-ar” corpus. The findings suggest that lexicon-driven strategies have the potential to refine MWE identification, particularly for unseen occurrences.

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) have been a bottleneck for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks due to their idiomaticity, ambiguity, and non-compositionality. Bilingual parallel corpora introducing MWE annotations are very scarce which set another challenge for current Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, especially in a multilingual setting. This work presents AlphaMWE-Arabic, an Arabic edition of the AlphaMWE parallel corpus with MWE annotations. We introduce how we created this corpus including machine translation (MT), post-editing, and annotations for both standard and dialectal varieties, i.e. Tunisian and Egyptian Arabic. We analyse the MT errors when they meet MWEs-related content, both quantitatively using the human-in-the-loop metric HOPE and qualitatively. We report the current state-of-the-art MT systems are far from reaching human parity performances. We expect our bilingual English-Arabic corpus will be an asset for multilingual research on MWEs such as translation and localisation, as well as for monolingual settings including the study of Arabic-specific lexicography and phrasal verbs on MWEs. Our corpus and experimental data are available at https://github.com/aaronlifenghan/AlphaMWE.

We present version 1.3 of the PARSEME multilingual corpus annotated with verbal multiword expressions. Since the previous version, new languages have joined the undertaking of creating such a resource, some of the already existing corpora have been enriched with new annotated texts, while others have been enhanced in various ways. The PARSEME multilingual corpus represents 26 languages now. All monolingual corpora therein use Universal Dependencies v.2 tagset. They are (re-)split observing the PARSEME v.1.2 standard, which puts impact on unseen VMWEs. With the current iteration, the corpus release process has been detached from shared tasks; instead, a process for continuous improvement and systematic releases has been introduced.

The PARSEME (Parsing and Multiword Expressions) project proposes multilingual corpora annotated for multiword expressions (MWEs). In this case study, we focus on the Turkish corpus of PARSEME. Turkish is an agglutinative language and shows high inflection and derivation in word forms. This can cause some issues in terms of automatic morphosyntactic annotation. We provide an overview of the problems observed in the morphosyntactic annotation of the Turkish PARSEME corpus. These issues are mostly observed on the lemmas, which is important for the approximation of a type of an MWE. We propose modifications of the original corpus with some enhancements on the lemmas and parts of speech. The enhancements are then evaluated with an identification system from the PARSEME Shared Task 1.2 to detect MWEs, namely Seen2Seen. Results show increase in the F-measure for MWE identification, emphasizing the necessity of robust morphosyntactic annotation for MWE processing, especially for languages that show high surface variability.

Cet article décrit nos efforts pour étendre le projet PARSEME à l’arabe standard moderne. L’applicabilité du guide d’annotation de PARSEME a été testée en mesurant l’accord inter-annotateurs dès la première phase d’annotation. Un sous-ensemble de 1062 phrases du Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank (PADT) a été sélectionné et annoté indépendamment par deux locutrices natives arabes. Suite à leurs annotations, un nouveau corpus arabe avec plus de 1250 expressions polylexicales verbales (EPV) annotées a été construit.

This paper describes our efforts to extend the PARSEME framework to Modern Standard Arabic. Theapplicability of the PARSEME guidelines was tested by measuring the inter-annotator agreement in theearly annotation stage. A subset of 1,062 sentences from the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank PADTwas selected and annotated by two Arabic native speakers independently. Following their annotations, anew Arabic corpus with over 1,250 annotated VMWEs has been built. This corpus already exceeds thesmallest corpora of the PARSEME suite, and enables first observations. We discuss our annotation guide-line schema that shows full MWE annotation is realizable in Arabic where we get good inter-annotator agreement.