Discriminative Strategies to Integrate Multiword Expression Recognition and Parsing

The integration of multiword expressions in a parsing procedure has been shown to improve accuracy in an artificial context where such expressions have been perfectly pre-identified. This paper evaluates two empirical strategies to integrate multiword units in a real constituency parsing context and shows that the results are not as promising as has sometimes been suggested. Firstly, we show that pregrouping multiword expressions before parsing with a state-of-the-art recognizer improves multiword recognition accuracy and unlabeled attachment score. However, it has no statistically significant impact in terms of F-score as incorrect multiword expression recognition has important side effects on parsing. Secondly, integrating multiword expressions in the parser grammar followed by a reranker specific to such expressions slightly improves all evaluation metrics.