Using Distributional Similarity of Multi-way Translations to Predict Multiword Expression Compositionality

Abstract

We predict the compositionality of multi-word expressions using distributional similarity between each component word and the overall expression, based on translations into multiple languages. We evaluate the method over English noun compounds, English verb particle constructions and German noun compounds. We show that the estimation of compositionality is improved when using translations into multiple languages, as compared to simply using distributional similarity in the source language. We further find that string similarity complements distributional similarity. © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics.