Modelling the Internal Variability of MWEs

The issue of flexibility of multiword expressions (MWEs) is crucial towards their identification and extraction in running text, as well as their better understanding from a linguistic perspective. If we project a large MWE lexicon onto a corpus, projecting fixed forms suffers from low recall, while an unconstrained flexible search for lemmas yields a loss in precision. In this talk, I will describe a method aimed at maximising precision in the identification of MWEs in flexible mode, building on the idea that internal variability can be modelled via so-called variation patterns. I will discuss the advantages and limitations of using variation patterns, compare their performance to that of association measures, and explore their usability in MWE extraction, too.