Semantics-based Multiword Expression Extraction

This paper describes a fully unsupervised and automated method for large-scale extraction of multiword expressions (MWEs) from large corpora. The method aims at capturing the non-compositionality of MWEs; the intuition is that a noun within a MWE cannot easily be replaced by a semantically similar noun. To implement this intuition, a noun clustering is automatically extracted (using distributional similarity measures), which gives us clusters of semantically related nouns. Next, a number of statistical measures – based on selectional preferences – is developed that formalize the intuition of non-compositionality. Our approach has been tested on Dutch, and automatically evaluated using Dutch lexical resources.