Modeling the Non-Substitutability of Multiword Expressions with Distributional Semantics and a Log-Linear Model

Abstract

Non-substitutability is a property of Multiword Expressions (MWEs) that often causes lexical rigidity and is relevant for most types of MWEs. Efficient identification of this property can result in the efficient identification of MWEs. In this work we propose using distributional semantics, in the form of word embeddings, to identify candidate substitutions for a candidate MWE and model its substitutability. We use our models to rank MWEs based on their lexical rigidity and study their performance in comparison with association measures. We also study the interaction between our models and association measures. We show that one of our models can significantly improve over the association measure baselines, identifying collocations.