Microsyntactic Phenomena as a Computational Linguistics Issue

Microsyntactic linguistic units, such as syntactic idioms and non-standard syntactic constructions, are poorly represented in linguistic resources, mostly because the former are elements occupying an intermediate position between the lexicon and the grammar and the latter are too specific to be routinely tackled by general grammars. Consequently, many such units produce substantial gaps in systems intended to solve sophisticated computational linguistics tasks, such as parsing, deep semantic analysis, question answering, machine translation, or text generation. They also present obstacles for applying advanced techniques to these tasks, such as machine learning. The paper discusses an approach aimed at bridging such gaps, focusing on the development of monolingual and multilingual corpora where microsyntactic units are to be tagged.