Multiword Unit Hybrid Extraction

This paper describes an original hybrid system that extracts multiword unit candidates from part-of-speech tagged corpora. While classical hybrid systems manually define local part-ofspeech patterns that lead to the identification of well-known multiword units (mainly compound nouns), our solution automatically identifies relevant syntactical patterns from the corpus. Word statistics are then combined with the endogenously acquired linguistic information in order to extract the most relevant sequences of words. As a result, (1) human intervention is avoided providing total flexibility of use of the system and (2) different multiword units like phrasal verbs, adverbial locutions and prepositional locutions may be identified. The system has been tested on the Brown Corpus leading to encouraging results.