Abstract
We present the enrichment of a French treebank of various genres with a new annotation layer for multiword expressions (MWEs) and named entities (NEs).1 Our contribution with respect to previous work on NE and MWE annotation is the particular care taken to use formal criteria, organized into decision flowcharts, shedding some light on the interactions between NEs and MWEs. Moreover, in order to cope with the well-known difficulty to draw a clear-cut frontier between compositional expressions and MWEs, we chose to use sufficient criteria only. As a result, annotated MWEs satisfy a varying number of sufficient criteria, accounting for the scalar nature of the MWE status. In addition to the span of the elements, annotation includes the subcategory of NEs (e.g., person, location) and one matching sufficient criterion for non-verbal MWEs (e.g., lexical substitution). The 3,099 sentences of the treebank were double-annotated and adjudicated, and we paid attention to cross-type consistency and compatibility with thesyntactic layer. Overall inter-annotator agreement on non-verbal MWEs and NEs reached 71.1%. The released corpus contains 3,112 annotated NEs and 3,440 MWEs, and is distributed under an open license.
Highlights
Multiword expressions (MWEs) such as idioms and light-verb constructions have been the focus of a vast amount of linguistic studies and annotation projects
We leave it as future work to test a unified modeling principle. Another heterogeneity issue stems from the fact that verbal MWE annotation follows a detailed flowchart with about 40 tests, while non-verbal MWEs are all contained in one category and covered by 10 generic tests, each of which is considered individually sufficient
We presented the annotation of named entities and multiword expressions in Sequoia (Candito and Seddah 2012), a French treebank covering various written genres
Summary
The idiosyncrasy at the heart of the concept of MWE is a challenge for any linguistic theory and disrupts automatic processing, as MWEs mix idiosyncratic and regular patterns. Because of their partly unpredictable behavior, MWEs have been widely listed in lexicons and annotated in corpora. The overlap between MWEs and NEs has rarely been studied Given these challenges, our first objective is to provide operational criteria for defining MWEs on the one hand and NEs on the other hand, so that both categories can be precisely distinguished and annotated within the same framework. We chose not to use pre-existing MWE and NE lexicons, to avoid biases, but we use post-annotation coherence checking tools to improve cross-type consistency of annotations
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