A Large Automatically-Acquired All-Words List of Multiword Expressions Scored for Compositionality

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

Abstract

We present and make available a large automatically-acquired all-words list of English multiword expressions scored for compositionality. Intrinsic evaluation against manually-produced gold standards demonstrates that our compositionality estimates are sound, and extrinsic evaluation via incorporation of our list into a machine translation system to better handle idiomatic expressions results in a statistically significant improvement to the system's BLEU scores. As the method used to produce the list is language-independent, we also make available lists in seven other European languages.