How many multiword expressions do people know?

  • Authors:
  • Kenneth Church

  • Affiliations:
  • HLT COE, Johns Hopkins University

  • Venue:
  • MWE '11 Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Parsing and Generation to the Real World
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

What is a multiword expression (MWE) and how many are there? What is a MWE? What is many? Mark Liberman gave a great invited talk at ACL-89 titled "how many words do people know?" where he spent the entire hour questioning the question. Many of these same questions apply to multiword expressions. What is a word? What is many? What is a person? What does it mean to know? Rather than answer these questions, this paper will use these questions as Liberman did, as an excuse for surveying how such issues are addressed in a variety of fields: computer science, web search, linguistics, lexicography, educational testing, psychology, statistics, etc.