Exploiting translational correspondences for pattern-independent MWE identification

Abstract

Based on a study of verb translations in the Europarl corpus, we argue that a wide range of MWE patterns can be identified in translations that exhibit a correspondence between a single lexical item in the source language and a group of lexical items in the target language. We show that these correspondences can be reliably detected on dependency-parsed, word-aligned sentences. We propose an extraction method that combines word alignment with syntactic filters and is independent of the structural pattern of the translation.