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# MWEs in Treebanks: From Survey to Guidelines

**Authors:** [Victoria Rosén](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/victoria-rosen/), Koenraad De Smedt, Gyri Smørdal Losnegaard, Eduard Bejček, Agata Savary, Petya Osenova · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L16-1368](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1368/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**8** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/bank-2016-rosen-mwes-treebanks-survey-guidelines/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L16-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1368/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1368.pdf)

**Authors (6)**

1. Victoria Rosén
2. Koenraad De Smedt
3. Gyri Smørdal Losnegaard
4. Eduard Bejček
5. Agata Savary
6. Petya Osenova

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The PARSEME working group surveyed how multiword expressions (MWEs) are annotated in treebanks through a wiki table filled in by people who know each treebank. The survey shows wide variation: light verb constructions are either given a special label or treated as ordinary verbs, and VP idioms are handled by several different strategies, across dependency, constituency and HPSG or LFG treebanks. The authors examine six treebanks in detail, including the UZH Alpine German, Prague, Persian UD, Szeged and NorGramBank treebanks. From this they propose four general principles: mark MWEs so they can be found without heuristics (A), keep non-compositional MWEs apart from compositional ones (B), normalize each MWE occurrence to a canonical form (C), and make each MWE type retrievable as a set (D).

## Ideas

- I1. Light-verb marking in the `en` lexicon: mark light verb constructions (take a shower, make a wish, have a nap) with `compound:lvc` in the `mova` dialect, check that `en/src/udreg.rs` accepts the relation for English, and measure LAS on EWT test restricted to the tokens of those constructions.
- I2. Canonical MWE lemma in `en/src/morph.rs`: map particle verbs and light-verb phrases to one canonical form (shut down, take a shower) and measure how many EWT tokens of the same MWE share one canonical form before and after, against the current lemma accuracy of 99.3 to 99.5 percent.
- I3. Principle D as a query: have `en` write the MWE type as a MISC feature and check that every idiom in `en/seeds/lexicon` is retrievable as one set; measure the share of EWT and GUM idioms that the rule finds (test only for GUM).
- I4. Idioms in `prag`: a VP idiom (let the cat out of the bag) must not create a literal event in `prag`/`world`; measure the share of idiomatic sentences that produce a false event on a hand-checked set of 100.

## For Mova

The lexical side is `en/seeds/lexicon` and `en/src/morph.rs`, the tagger and parser are `en/src/ptag.rs` and `en/src/parse.rs`, and the event side is `prag` and `world`. The chapter that the ideas touch is [19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/). Measure first: the share of EWT light-verb constructions that the current `en` output labels as ordinary verbs.

Topics: [Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```
@inproceedings{rosen2016mwes,
  title = {{MWEs in Treebanks: From Survey to Guidelines}},
  author = {Rosén, Victoria and Smedt, Koenraad De and Losnegaard, Gyri Smørdal and Bejček, Eduard and Savary, Agata and Osenova, Petya},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L16-1368/}
}
```

- [← previous Validation Issues induced by an Automatic Pre-Annotation Mechanism in the Building of Non-projective Dependency Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-2014-lacroix-validation-issues-induced-automatic-pre/)
- [next → Automatically Selecting the Best Dependency Annotation Design with Dynamic Oracles](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-2018-wisniewski-automatically-selecting-best-dependency-annotation/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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