Local Grammars for the Description of Multi{Word Lexemes and their Automatic Recognition in Texts

Most multi{word lexemes (MWLs) allow certain types of variation. This has to be taken into account for their description to be able to recognize them in texts. We suggest to describe their syntactic restrictions and their idiosyncratic peculiarities with local grammar rules, which at the same time permit to express regularities valid for a whole class of MWLs such as word order variation in German. The local grammars can be written in a very convenient and compact way as regular expressions in the formalism IDAREX which uses a two-level morphology. IDAREX allows to deene various types of variables, and to mix canonical and innected word forms in the regular expressions. The nite{ state based dictionary look{up system locolex/compass uses such local grammars to recognize MWLs in English, German and French on{line texts.