The correct interpretation of Multiword Units (MWUs) is crucial to many applications in Natural Language Processing but is a challenging and complex task. In recent years, the computational treatment of MWUs has received considerable attention but there is much more to be done before we can claim that NLP and Machine Translation (MT) systems process MWUs successfully. This volume provides a general overview of the field with particular reference to Machine Translation and Translation Technology and focuses on languages such as English, Basque, French, Romanian, German, Dutch and Croatian, among others. The chapters of the volume illustrate a variety of topics that address this challenge, such as the use of rule-based approaches, compound splitting techniques, MWU identification methodologies in multilingual applications, and MWU alignment issues.

The investigation of phraseology through corpus-based and computational approaches holds significant relevance for various professionals, including translators, interpreters, terminologists, lexicographers, language instructors, and learners. Computational Phraseology, and in particular the computational analysis of multiword expressions (also known as multiword units), has gained prominence in recent years and is essential for a number of Natural Language Processing and Translation Technology applications. The failure to detect these units automatically could result in incorrect and problematic automatic translations and could hinder the performance of applications such as text summarisation and web search. Against this background, the volume offers 13 articles carefully selected and organised into two parts: ‘Computational treatment of multiword units’ and ‘Corpus-based and linguistic studies in phraseology‘. The contributions not only highlight the latest advancements in computational and corpus-based phraseology but also reiterate its vital role in all areas of language technologies, including basic and applied research.

​This book is an excellent introduction to multiword expressions. It provides a unique, comprehensive and up-to-date overview of this exciting topic in computational linguistics. The first part describes the diversity and richness of multiword expressions, including many examples in several languages. These constructions are not only complex and arbitrary, but also much more frequent than one would guess, making them a real nightmare for natural language processing applications. The second part introduces a new generic framework for automatic acquisition of multiword expressions from texts. Furthermore, it describes the accompanying free software tool, the mwetoolkit, which comes in handy when looking for expressions in texts (regardless of the language). Evaluation is greatly emphasized, underlining the fact that results depend on parameters like corpus size, language, MWE type, etc. The last part contains solid experimental results and evaluates the mwetoolkit, demonstrating its usefulness for computer-assisted lexicography and machine translation. This is the first book to cover the whole pipeline of multiword expression acquisition in a single volume. It is addresses the needs of students and researchers in computational and theoretical linguistics, cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and computer science. Its good balance between computational and linguistic views make it the perfect starting point for anyone interested in multiword expressions, language and text processing in general.

Whether you wish to deliver on a promise, take a walk down memory lane or even on the wild side, phraseological units (also often referred to as phrasemes or multiword expressions) are present in most communicative situations and in all world’s languages. Phraseology, the study of phraseological units, has therefore become a rare unifying theme across linguistic theories. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have been concerned with the computational treatment of multiword expressions: these pertain among others to their automatic identification, extraction or translation, and to the role they play in various Natural Language Processing applications. Computational Phraseology is a comparatively new field where better understanding and more advances are urgently needed. This book aims to address this pressing need, by bringing together contributions focusing on different perspectives of this promising interdisciplinary field.

This book re-examines the notion of word associations, more precisely collocations. It attempts to come to a potentially more generally applicable definition of collocation and how to best extract, identify and measure collocations. The book highlights the role played by (i) automatic linguistic annotation (part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, etc.), (ii) using semantic criteria to facilitate the identification of collocations, (iii) multi-word structured, instead of the widespread assumption of bipartite collocational structures, for capturing the intricacies of the phenomenon of syntagmatic attraction, (iv) considering collocation and valency as near neighbours in the lexis-grammar continuum and (v) the mathematical properties of statistical association measures in the automatic extraction of collocations from corpora. This book is an ideal guide to the use of statistics in collocation analysis and lexicography, as well as a practical text to the development of skills in the application of computational lexicography. Lexical Collocation Analysis: Advances and Applications begins with a proposal for integrating both collocational and valency phenomena within the overarching theoretical framework of construction grammar. Next the book makes the case for integrating advances in syntactic parsing and in collocational analysis. Chapter 3 offers an innovative look at complementing corpus data and dictionaries in the identification of specific types of collocations consisting of restricted predicate-argument combinations. This strategy complements corpus collocational data with network analysis techniques applied to dictionary entries. Chapter 4 explains the potential of collocational graphs and networks both as a visualization tool and as an analytical technique. Chapter 5 introduces MERGE (Multi-word Expressions from the Recursive Grouping of Elements), a data-driven approach to the identification and extraction of multi-word expressions from corpora. Finally the book concludes with an analysis and evaluation of factors influencing the performance of collocation extraction methods in parsed corpora.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology, Europhras 2022, held in Malaga, Spain, in September 2022. The 16 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers in this volume cover a number of topics including general corpus-based approaches to phraseology, phraseology in translation and cross-linguistic studies, phraseology in language teaching and learning, phraseology in specialized languages, phraseology in lexicography, cognitive approaches to phraseology, the computational treatment of multiword expressions, and the development, annotation, and exploitation of corpora for phraseological studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Computational and Corpus-Based Phraseology, Europhras 2017, held in London, UK, in November 2017. The 31 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions and are organized into the following thematic sessions: Phraseology in translation and contrastive studies, Lexicography and terminography, Exploitation of corpora in phraseological studies, Development of corpora for phraseological studies, Phraseology and language learning, Cognitive and cultural aspects of phraseology, Theoretical and descriptive approaches to phraseology, and Computational approaches to phraseology. The chapter 'Frequency Consolidation Among Word N-Grams' is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.