Syntactic variation of support verb constructions

International audienceWe report experiments about the syntactic variations of support verb constructions, a special type of multiword expressions (MWEs) containing predicative nouns. In these expressions, the noun can occur with or without the verb, with no clear-cut semantic difference. We extracted from a large French corpus a set of examples of the two situations and derived statistical results from these data. The extraction involved large-coverage language resources and finite-state techniques. The results show that, most frequently, predicative nouns occur without a support verb. This fact has consequences on methods of extracting or recognising MWEs.Nous relatons des expériences sur les variations syntaxiques de constructions à verbe support, un type spécial d'expressions multi-mots (MWE) qui comportent des noms prédicatifs. Dans ces expressions, le nom peut apparaître avec ou sans le verbe, sans différence sémantique saillante. Nous avons extrait d'un vaste corpus de textes français un ensemble d'exemples des deux situations et nous avons tiré de ces données des résultats statistiques. L'extraction a mis en jeu des ressources linguistiques d'une couverture étendue et des techniques issues de la théorie des automates. Les résultats montrent que, la plupart du temps, les noms prédicatifs apparaissent sans verbe support. Ce fait a des conséquences sur les méthodes d'extraction et de reconnaissance de MWE

Automatic Detection of Idiomatic Clauses

We describe several experiments whose goal is to automatically identify idiomatic expressions in written text. We explore two approaches for the task: 1) idiom recognition as outlier detection; and 2) supervised classification of sentences. We apply principal component analysis for outlier detection. Detecting idioms as lexical outliers does not exploit class label information. So, in the following experiments, we use linear discriminant analysis to obtain a discriminant subspace and later use the three nearest neighbor classifier to obtain accuracy. We discuss pros and cons of each approach. All the approaches are more general than the previous algorithms for idiom detection - neither do they rely on target idiom types, lexicons, or large manually annotated corpora, nor do they limit the search space by a particular type of linguistic construction

A review of sentiment analysis research in Arabic language

Sentiment analysis is a task of natural language processing which has recently attracted increasing attention. However, sentiment analysis research has mainly been carried out for the English language. Although Arabic is ramping up as one of the most used languages on the Internet, only a few studies have focused on Arabic sentiment analysis so far. In this paper, we carry out an in-depth qualitative study of the most important research works in this context by presenting limits and strengths of existing approaches. In particular, we survey both approaches that leverage machine translation or transfer learning to adapt English resources to Arabic and approaches that stem directly from the Arabic language

A 38 million words Dutch text corpus and its users

The use of text corpora has increased considerably in the past few years, not only in the field of lexicography but also in computational linguistics and language technology. Consequently, corpus data and expertise developed by lexicographical institutions have gained a broader scope of application. In the European context this has led to a revised view of corpus design. In line with these developments, the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL) has since 1994 been providing external access to steadily improving corpora via Internet. In August 1996, the 38 Million Words Corpus was available for consultation by the international research community. The present paper reports on the characteristics of this corpus (design, text classification, linguistic annotation) and on its use, both in dictionary projects and in linguistic research. In spite of limitations with respect to corpus design, the INL corpora accessible via Internet have proved to meet external needs. By providing these facilities, the INL has acquired a much broader experience in corpus-building than before, which is essential for new, internal dictionary projects. Giving external access to corpus data which was developed primarily for internal purposes, may be profitable for all parties involved.Keywords: large electronic dutch text corpus, corpus design, text classification, topic, publication medium, linguistic annotation, on-line access via internet, corpus user

A Generic Approach to Processing Parallel Corpora of the Europarl for Distributional Discourse Patterns

Abstrac

Applying corpus and computational methods to loanword research : new approaches to Anglicisms in Spanish

Understanding both the linguistic and social roles of loanwords is becoming more relevant as globalization has brought loanwords into new settings, often previously viewed as monolingual. Their occurrence has the potential to impact speech communities, in that they have the capacity to alter the semantic relationships and social values ascribed to individual elements within the existing lexicon. In order to identify broad patterns, we must turn towards large and varied sources of data, specifically corpora. This dissertation aims to tackle some of the practical issues involved in the use of corpora, while addressing two conceptual issues in the field of loanword research – the social distribution and semantic nature of loanwords. In this dissertation, I propose two methods, adapted from advances in computational linguistics, which will contribute to two different stages of loanword research: processing corpora to find tokens of interest and semantically analyzing tokens of interest. These methods will be employed in two case studies. The first seeks to explore the social stratification of loanwords in Argentine Spanish. The second measures the semantic specificity of loanwords relative to their native equivalents.Spanish and Portugues

A practical approach to language complexity: a wikipedia case study

In this paper we present statistical analysis of English texts from Wikipedia. We try to address the issue of language complexity empirically by comparing the simple English Wikipedia (Simple) to comparable samples of the main English Wikipedia (Main). Simple is supposed to use a more simplified language with a limited vocabulary, and editors are explicitly requested to follow this guideline, yet in practice the vocabulary richness of both samples are at the same level. Detailed analysis of longer units (n-grams of words and part of speech tags) shows that the language of Simple is less complex than that of Main primarily due to the use of shorter sentences, as opposed to drastically simplified syntax or vocabulary. Comparing the two language varieties by the Gunning readability index supports this conclusion. We also report on the topical dependence of language complexity, that is, that the language is more advanced in conceptual articles compared to person-based (biographical) and object-based articles. Finally, we investigate the relation between conflict and language complexity by analyzing the content of the talk pages associated to controversial and peacefully developing articles, concluding that controversy has the effect of reducing language complexity

Multiword expressions at length and in depth

The annual workshop on multiword expressions takes place since 2001 in conjunction with major computational linguistics conferences and attracts the attention of an ever-growing community working on a variety of languages, linguistic phenomena and related computational processing issues. MWE 2017 took place in Valencia, Spain, and represented a vibrant panorama of the current research landscape on the computational treatment of multiword expressions, featuring many high-quality submissions. Furthermore, MWE 2017 included the first shared task on multilingual identification of verbal multiword expressions. The shared task, with extended communal work, has developed important multilingual resources and mobilised several research groups in computational linguistics worldwide. This book contains extended versions of selected papers from the workshop. Authors worked hard to include detailed explanations, broader and deeper analyses, and new exciting results, which were thoroughly reviewed by an internationally renowned committee. We hope that this distinctly joint effort will provide a meaningful and useful snapshot of the multilingual state of the art in multiword expressions modelling and processing, and will be a point point of reference for future work