Multi-word expressions evade a closed definition. Linguists and computational linguists rely on intuition or build lists of MWE types; while practical, that is scientifically and aesthetically unsatisfying. Without presuming to solve a daunting theoretical problem, we propose a decision procedure which steers a lexicographer toward acceptance or rejection of an N-gram as a lexical unit: a decis...

Through ACT (Annotated Corpora of Text) software package for lexical and corpus processing of European written cultural sources (currently used for processing of mediaeval Slavonic manuscripts) this work presents another step forward towards a contextual and intelligent heritage Information Technology framework. ACT is suitable for capturing characteristics of old written sources including rich...

This work presents a software package ACT (Annotated Corpora of Text) for lexical and corpus processing of European written cultural sources (currently used for processing of mediaeval Slavonic manuscripts). I use ACT as a contribution towards a contextual and intelligent heritage Information Technology framework. The software is suitable for capturing characteristics of old written sources inc...

The design of speech recognition system based on acoustically-derived, segmental units can be divided in three steps: unit design, lexicon building and pronunciation modeling. We formulate an iterative unit design procedure which consistently uses a maximum likelihood (ML) objective in successive application of resegmentation and model re-estimation. The lexicon building allows multi-word entri...

One of the largest remaining unsolved mysteries in cognitive science is how the rapid input of spoken language is mapped onto phonological and lexical representations over time. Attempts at psychologically-tractable computational models of spoken word recognition tend either to ignore time or to transform the temporal input into a spatial representation. This is the approach taken in TRACE (McC...

Similarly to simple words, compounds and other multi-word units (MWUs) are subject to inflection. A correct and exhaustive treatment of this issue has an important impact on natural language applications. However it raises some nontrivial questions such as: the role of separators in MWUs, morphological non-compositionality of MWUs, their syntactic and semantic variation, huge sizes of inflectio...

Our main research focus this year was on the use of phrases (or multi-word units) in query expansion. Multi-word units (MWUs) comprise a number of lexical units, such as named entities (“United Nations”), nominal compounds (“amusement park”) and phrasal verbs (‘check in’). Although MWUs can belong to different parts of speech, our focus was on nominal MWUs. We used a combined syntactico-statist...

There has been increasing interest in utilizing corpora in linguistic research and pedagogy in recent years. Rhetorical organization of different sections of research articles may appear similar in various disciplines, but close examination may show subtle differences nonetheless. One of the features that has been at the center of attention especially in recent years is the idiomaticity of a di...