Modeling the internal variability of multiword expressions through a pattern-based method.

The issue of internal variability of multiword expressions (MWEs) is crucial towards their identification and extraction in running text. We present a corpus-supported and computational study on Italian MWEs, aimed at defining an automatic method for modeling internal variation, exploiting frequency and part-of-speech (POS) information. We do so by deriving an XML-encoded lexicon of MWEs based on a manually compiled dictionary, which is then projected onto a a large corpus. Since a search for fixed forms suffers from low recall, while an unconstrained flexible search for lemmas yields a loss in precision, we suggest a procedure aimed at maximizing precision in the identification of MWEs within a flexible search. Our method builds on the idea that internal variability can be modelled via the novel introduction of variation patterns, which work over POS patterns, and can be used as working tools for controlling precision. We also compare the performance of variation patterns to that of association measures, and explore the possibility of using variation patterns in MWE extraction in addition to identification. Finally, we suggest that corpus-derived, pattern-related information can be included in the original MWE lexicon by means of an enriched coding and the creation of an XML-based repository of patterns.