Detecting Compositionality of Multi-Word Expressions using Nearest Neighbours in Vector Space Models

We present a novel unsupervised approach to detecting the compositionality of multi-word expressions. We compute the compositionality of a phrase through substituting the constituent words with their “neighbours” in a semantic vector space and averaging over the distance between the original phrase and the substituted neighbour phrases. Several methods of obtaining neighbours are presented. The results are compared to existing supervised results and achieve state-of-the-art performance on a verb-object dataset of human compositionality ratings.