Multiword expressions in NLP: General survey and a special case of verb-noun constructions

This chapter presents a survey of contemporary NLP research on Multiword Expressions (MWEs). MWEs pose a huge problem to precise language processing due to their idiosyncratic nature and diversity of their semantic, lexical, and syntactical properties. The chapter begins by considering MWEs definitions, describes some MWEs classes, indicates problems MWEs generate in language applications and their possible solutions, presents methods of MWE encoding in dictionaries and their automatic detection in corpora. The chapter goes into more detail on a particular MWE class called Verb-Noun Constructions (VNCs). Due to their frequency in corpus and unique characteristics, VNCs present a research problem in their own right. Having outlined several approaches to VNC representation in lexicons, the chapter explains the formalism of Lexical Function as a possible VNC representation. Such representation may serve as a tool for VNCs automatic detection in a corpus. The latter is illustrated on Spanish material applying some supervised learning methods commonly used for NLP tasks.