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SUMMARY:Having a closer look at Multiword Expressions - Aline Villavicenci
 o  (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and University of Bat
 h)
DTSTART:20070206T160000Z
DTEND:20070206T173000Z
UID:TALK6323@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Teresa Parodi
DESCRIPTION:The term Multiword Expressions (MWEs) has been used to describ
 e expressions for which the syntactic or semantic properties of the whole 
 expression cannot be derived from its parts\, including a large number of 
 related but distinct phenomena\, such as phrasal verbs (e.g. come along)\,
  nominal compounds (e.g. frying pan)\, institutionalised phrases (e.g. bre
 ad and butter)\, and many others. \n\nDue to their heterogeneous character
 istics\, MWEs present a tough challenge for both linguistic and computatio
 nal work (Sag et al.\, 2002). However\, they are an integral part of langu
 age and their importance has long been recognised. Moreover\, as the numbe
 r of such expressions in a speaker´s lexicon is equiparable to the number
  of single word units (Jackendoff\, 1997)\, an appropriate treatment of MW
 Es is important for many language technology tasks and applications. This 
 is reflected in several existing grammars and lexical resources\, where al
 most half of the entries are MWEs. Nonetheless\, regardless of how large a
  hand-crafted widecoverage resource is\, there are always going to be word
 s and constructions that are not included in it. Therefore\, MWEs still ca
 use a large number of problems\, such as parse failures\, due to e.g. miss
 ing lexical entries or syntactic idiosyncracies. \n\nIn this talk I give a
  brief summary of what multiword expressions are and some of the the chall
 enges that they pose. I then present some proposals for detecting MWEs in 
 corpora and subsequently handling them. These range from language specific
  methods for dealing with a particular type of MWE to more language indepe
 ndent approaches for treating MWEs in general\, using  resources like corp
 ora and the World Wide Web and a combination of linguistic and statistical
  information. 
LOCATION:GR-05\, English Faculty Building
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