Lexicons Gain the Upper Hand in Arabic MWE Identification

Abstract

This paper highlights the importance of integrating MWE identification with the development of syntactic MWE lexicons. It suggests that lexicons with minimal morphosyntactic information can amplify current MWE-annotated datasets and refine identification strategies. To our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to focus on both seen and unseen of VMWEs for Arabic. It also deals with the challenge of differentiating between literal and figurative interpretations of idiomatic expressions. The approach involves a dual-phase procedure: first projecting a VMWE lexicon onto a corpus to identify candidate occurrences, then disambiguating these occurrences to distinguish idiomatic from literal instances. Experiments outlined in the paper aim to assess the efficacy of this technique, utilizing a lexicon known as LEXAR and the “parseme-ar” corpus. The findings suggest that lexicon-driven strategies have the potential to refine MWE identification, particularly for unseen occurrences.

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