Fitting Fixed Expressions into the UD Mould: Swedish as a Use Case

What it is about

UD marks some multiword expressions with the relation fixed. The paper analyses 439 Swedish expressions that are annotated as fixed in two Swedish UD treebanks, to see which of them match the definition. Prepositional phrases make up almost 40% of the set. About 17% (75) can be written with or without spaces, and 96 show no variation at all; counting collapsed and abbreviated forms gives 146 rigid expressions. Only 71 expressions are shared by the two treebanks, and 216 occur once. The paper argues that many of these expressions have a transparent syntax that the single relation hides, and suggests Construction Grammar as a model for them.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/lexgen.rs and en/src/dict.rs: list English multiword entries (of course, at first, by and large) with their variants. Count how many have a collapsible spelling and how many are rigid. Measure on EWT test, and fix the list before looking at any parser output.
• I2. English has the same split-or-joined spelling problem as the paper's Swedish cases: any more / anymore, every day / everyday, in to / into, a lot / alot. Make a test list of such pairs and check with en parse-eval that both spellings get the same lemma, tags and relation to the head; report the mismatch count.
• I3. en/src/parse.rs: count the arcs labelled fixed and flat in EWT test and see which share of them are prepositional phrases. Measure the LAS of those arcs before any change of the label set.

For Mova

The chapter is 19. The lexicon: vocabulary, multiword expressions and register, with 21. The simple clause for the transparent syntax of such expressions. The code is en/src/lexgen.rs, en/src/tok.rs and en/src/parse.rs. The paper's data is Swedish and the licence is NC, so it gives no English numbers; English figures must come from EWT test.

Topics: Universal Dependencies · Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3chtzfj7n2h3

@inproceedings{ahrenberg2024fitting,
  title = {{Fitting Fixed Expressions into the UD Mould: Swedish as a Use Case}},
  author = {Ahrenberg, Lars},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.63317/3chtzfj7n2h3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3chtzfj7n2h3}
}

References

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