Identification of Multiwords as Preprocessing for Automatic Extraction of Lexical Similarities

Previous approaches on automatic extraction of lexical similarities have considered as semantic unit of text the word. However, the theoretical perspective of contextual lexical semantics suggests that larger segments of text, specifically non-compositional multiwords, are more appropriate for this role. We experimentally tested the applicability of this notion, applying automatic collocation extraction to identify and merge such multiwords prior to the similarity estimation process. Employing an automatic comparative evaluation scheme we ascertain improvement of the extracted lexico-semantic knowledge.