Fleshing it out: A Supervised Approach to MWE-token and MWE-type Classification

Abstract

Although some multiword expressions (MWEs) like How do you do? have exclusively idiomatic meaning, other MWE-types like the phrase kick the bucket may be idiomatic or literal depending on context. The recently developed OpenMWE corpus provides the largest freely available collection of annotated MWE-tokens suitable for supervised classification, but so far its potential has only been superficially investigated and only for classification of MWE-types in the corpus. Instead, we train and evaluate classifiers for crosstype classification and introduce novel features specialised to this task. Our best crosstype classifiers performed as well on non-trained MWE-types as a majority class baseline ..