A Generic Framework for Multiword Expressions Treatment: from Acquisition to Applications

This paper presents an open and flexible methodological framework for the automatic acquisition of multiword expressions (MWEs) from monolingual textual corpora. This research is motivated by the importance of MWEs for NLP applications. After briefly presenting the modules of the framework, the paper reports extrinsic evaluation results considering two applications: computer-aided lexicography and statistical machine translation. Both applications can benefit from automatic MWE acquisition and the expressions acquired automatically from corpora can both speed up and improve their quality. The promising results of previous and ongoing experiments encourage further investigation about the optimal way to integrate MWE treatment into these and many other applications.