Distinguishing Subtypes of Multiword Expressions Using Linguistically-Motivated Statistical Measures

We identify several classes of multiword expressions that each require a different encoding in a (computational) lexicon, as well as a different treatment within a computational system. We examine linguistic properties pertaining to the degree of semantic idiosyncrasy of these classes of expressions. Accordingly, we propose statistical measures to quantify each property, and use the measures to automatically distinguish the classes.