Multiword Expressions Research Articles

German-to-Basque Translation Analysis of Multiword Expressions in a Learner Translation Corpus

This paper presents the results of the annotation in a learner translation corpus consisting of German source texts and student translations into Basque. The analysis was carried out with the purpose of identifying trainee translators’ strengths and weaknesses when translating multiword expressions, such as compounds, collocations, and idioms. The data comprised eight German source texts and sixty-eight Basque translations from undergraduate students enrolled at the University of the Basque Country. From the total number of annotations (1214), which include not only errors but also cases of interference from the source language and positive outcomes, around 27 % are related to multiword expressions. The results of the translation analysis show that there are variables — such as the use of machine translation systems, the level of specialisation of the source text, the type of multiword expression to be translated or the absence of a literal counterpart in the target language — that may affect the translation of such units and lead to erroneous solutions and/or interference in the outputs produced by the trainee translators. From a pedagogical point of view, these findings will have a direct impact on the translation classes and will be very valuable for designing corpus-based in-class activities

MULTI-WORD EXPRESSIONS IN ANNUAL REPORTS OF AMERICAN AND BRITISH CORPORATIONS: A CORPUS-BASED DIACHRONIC STUDY

The aim of the paper was to do diachronic linguistic research in Corporate English by doing a lexical analysis of American and British annual reports for fiscal years 2002 and 2021. Corporations, as entities of creative disruption, stay at the heart of capitalism and act as the engine of technological development in the world. However, the language of their communication with their owners (shareholders) and other stakeholders interested in their performance, such as employees, suppliers, lenders, and prospective owners, has not been empirically analysed. The article provides the results of diachronic corpus-based research of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in Corporate English. The annual reports of ten American and ten British corporations for fiscal years 2001 and 2021 were analysed separately to get information about the lexical changes that occurred in these financial documents in two variants of English over two decades. The results of the research revealed both differences and diachronic changes at the lexical level in American and British Corporate English and the same can be used in BE classes to make BE students aware of two varieties of English by presenting and practicing real empirically proved vocabulary. The results of the research can be used in BE classes in a variety of ways, bearing in mind that BE students, to communicate effectively, should be exposed to the newest vocabulary used in the business world.

Automating Knowledge Acquisition for Content-Centric Cognitive Agents Using LLMs

The paper describes a system that uses large language model (LLM) technology to support automatic learning of new entries in an intelligent agent’s semantic lexicon. The process is bootstrapped by an existing non-toy lexicon and a natural language generator that converts formal, ontologically-grounded representations of meaning into natural language sentences. The learning method involves a sequence of LLM requests and includes an automatic quality control step. To date, this learning method has been applied to learning multiword expressions whose meanings are equivalent to those of transitive verbs in the agent’s lexicon. The experiment demonstrates the benefits of a hybrid learning architecture that integrates knowledge-based methods and resources with both traditional data analytics and LLMs.

Most Frequent Multi-Word Expressions in English for Banking: A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study

The aim of the paper is to perform diachronic research in one segment of Business English – English for Banking to check the diachronic stability of its vocabulary. Therefore, an analysis of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in 15 syntactic categories in annual reports of four biggest US banks for fiscal years 2006 and 2021 was made. More precisely, the diachronic changes comprising the span of time of 15 years were analysed in both the frequency of the occurrence of MWEs across the 15 analysed syntactic categories and in their percentage relationship to the scope of the corpora. The corpus analysis made it possible to extract real language in use, enabling the author to determine diachronic changes in vocabulary across categories, thus bridging the gap between the existing knowledge of vocabulary in English for Banking and the current situation. The research showed that there is a high statistical significance of changes in both the frequency of the occurrence of MWEs across the 15 analysed categories and in their percentage relationship to the scope of the corpus in the period over 15 years. The research findings might be useful for both Business English lecturers and their students, due to the various possible pedagogical implications of the results. The research might function as an impetus for linguists doing research in corpus linguistics to undertake further research in other areas of Business English to determine and describe possible changes in the language used. These areas could include: international trade, logistics, wholesale, retailing, industry, business media, leadership, management, marketing or investing.

Eye movements in the investigation of different properties of multi-word expressions: A systematic review

The last ten years have seen an increased use of the eye-tracking methodology in the investigation of vocabulary processing in both L1 and L2. In particular, some of the advantages afforded by this method – such as, the ability to analyse multiple areas of interest (AOIs) and to distinguish between early and late stages of processing – have contributed to our deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind the online processing of sequences above the word level, known as multi-word expressions (MWEs). One key finding widely reported in the eye-tracking literature is that MWEs are processed faster than novel sequences. Different properties of MWEs – frequency, figurativeness, literality, familiarity, transparency, predictability, collocation strength, contextual predictability, adjacency, flexibility, modifiability, and congruency – have been shown to contribute to this processing advantage and to affect different types of MWEs differently. In this review, we first focus on the specific methodological aspects that need to be considered in the application of eye-tracking in the investigation of MWEs. We then discuss how these aspects have been treated in the literature to examine the different properties of MWEs.

Celebrating diversity: The origins and pathways of three support-verb constructions

Support-verb constructions are combinations of a verb and a noun that fill the predicate slot of a sentence, such as to make a suggestion in I made the suggestion that she join us. While qualifying as semantic-lexemic phrasemes (collocations and idioms) in Mel’čuk’s Sens-Texte framework, they sit at the lexicon-syntax interface. They qualify as verbal multi-word expressions lexically speaking and form complex predicates syntactically. In classical and post-classical Greek, support-verb constructions form an internally heterogenous group of constructions, yet one that has existed since the earliest records of the language and survives into the modern variety. The present chapter capitalises on the over 2000 years of continuous written history of Greek, and the internal heterogeneity of the group of support-verb constructions, in that it investigates the origins and pathways of three members of this group in the literary (Thesaurus Linguae Graecae) and documentary (Duke Database of Documentary Papyri) corpora of Greek. The bulk of documentary texts dates from the 3rd c. BC onwards, whereas the earliest literary texts date from around the 8th c. BC. The variety of sources allows us to trace the three structures of interest through the centuries in varying environments and thus to trace traditions and independent developments. δίκην δίδωμι dikēn didōmi existed as a collocation ‘to give judgement(s)’ from archaic times and into the medieval period, in classical times, the idiom δίκην δίδωμι dikēn didōmi ‘to pay the price for one’s actions’ arose and became indexed for the technical and higher registers. In χάριν ἀπολαμβάνω kharin apolambanō ‘to receive a favour’, the prototypical compound ἀπολαμβάνω apolambanō seems to be diatopically and subsequently diastratically indexed but retreats into the higher registers after the classical period; the canonical simplex verb λαμβάνω lambanō predates it in early classical verse and postdates it. προσέχω τὸν νοῦν prosekhō ton noun exists as an idiom especially in medical discourse from at least classical times onwards but in parallel also as a pragmateme from archaic times onwards. Support-verb constructions are a pattern that is considered near universal in languages, such that especially the methodological tool of the support-verb-construction field developed and drawn upon in this chapter is transferable beyond Greek.

Effectiveness of Training EFL Majors on Multi-word Expressions to Develop Writing Quality

Effectiveness of Training EFL Majors on Multi-word Expressions to Develop Writing Quality

Модифікований метод пошуку ключових слів та термінів у текстових даних

This article discusses the issue of automated search for keywords and key terms in text data. To improve the efficiency of the tools of automated search for keywords in the text according to the criteria of absolute accuracy and Jaccard index, a modification of one of the most modern methods for searching for keywords has been developed. A modification of the existing hybrid keyword search method is proposed. It takes into account complex dependencies between pairs of words in the text to determine multi-word expressions, which, unlike the original method, allows finding key terms consisting of several words. Tests of the created modification of the hybrid method of searching for key terms showed the effectiveness of its use for searching for key terms in texts in comparison with existing analogues.

Multi-word Expressions in German Annual Reports: A Diachronic Approach

Corporations and stock exchanges are considered the "heart of capitalism" because they are responsible for the creation of inventions, new technologies, and entire industries in the past two centuries, and thus, through their actions, have significantly supported technological and social progress. Since the second half of the 19th century, German corporations have played the role of a pillar of the German economy and Germany has become one of the most economically developed European countries. Despite its economic importance, the German corporate language, as a segment of Business German (German: Wirtschaftsdeutsch), has not been significantly researched. This corpus linguistics paper presents the results of diachronic research of multi-word expressions in the annual reports of corporations from the three most important DAX Prime Standard indices, created by the German Stock Exchange (German: Deutsche Börse) from Frankfurt am Main – DAX, MDAX, and S-DAX. The subject of the linguistic analysis is the annual reports of 11 German corporations for the fiscal years 1997 and 2022. The results of the analysis show changes in the lexicon in the German corporate language over the past 25 years and can be a stimulus for further corpus research in that area. The results of the research can also have pedagogical implications because they can be used to create various types of lexical exercises in Business German classes, which contain the latest vocabulary from that field.

Review: "The Role of Constituents in Multiword Expressions: An Interdisciplinary, Cross-lingual Perspective"

Review: "The Role of Constituents in Multiword Expressions: An Interdisciplinary, Cross-lingual Perspective"

Imageability norms for 90 English spatio-temporal prepositions and semantically similar expressions

Imageability norms are presented for 90 single- and multiword spatio-temporal expressions of English including classic prepositions (e.g., at, in front [of]), intransitive prepositions (e.g., away), and common combinations such as up against. This 90-item set is a substantial enlargement and enhancement of a 56-item set collected in relation to a recently published study of phrasal verbs. For nearly half of the expressions in that earlier set there are now revised mean ratings based on proportionally large increases in the number of respondents from whom ratings were obtained. The enlarged set includes 34 newly rated spatio-temporal expressions, 19 of which appear to have no other published imageability rating. The 90-item list appears to be unique in its coverage of multiword prepositions and unusual in that 20% of the ratings pertain to items that raters saw with disambiguating information (e.g., “back, as in move back”). These 90 norms could be useful in many streams of research owing both to the importance of spatio-temporal prepositions in communication and to the well-established association of lexeme imageability with enhanced memorability, speedy mental processing, and learnability.

When MIPVU goes to no man’s land: a new language resource for hybrid, morpheme-based metaphor identification in Hungarian

AbstractThe aim of the article is to present a new language resource for metaphor analysis in corpora that is (i) a MIPVU-inspired, morpheme-based process for identifying metaphor in Hungarian and (ii) the refinement and innovative version of metaphor identification extending the scope of the process to multi-word expressions. The elaboration of language-specific protocols in metaphor identification has become one of the central endeavors in contemporary cross-linguistic research on metaphor, but there is a gap in the field regarding languages with rich morphology, especially in the case of Hungarian. To fill this gap, we developed a hybrid, morpheme-based version of the original method, which can handle morphologically complex metaphorical expressions. Additional innovations of our protocol are the measurement and tagging of idiomaticity in metaphors based on collocation analysis and the identification of semantic relationships between the components of metaphorical expressions. The present paper discusses both the theoretical motivation and the practical details of the adapted method for metaphor identification. As a conclusion, the presented protocol can provide new answers to the questions of metaphor identification in languages with rich morphology and shed new light on the internal semantic organization of linguistic metaphors.

Multi-word echoes of English: Visible vs. invisible Anglicisms in Danish

The focus of this article is the developments in contemporary Danish of direct vis-à-vis indirect borrowing strategies regarding English expressions. In order to distinguish direct borrowings of such items from codeswitches, the author presents a number of approaches found in the existing literature and suggests an operational definition of codeswitching. Eight scenarios involving the adoption and/or translation of English multi-word or polymorphemic expressions are presented, and the trajectories over three decades of forty-four Danish Anglicisms representing all scenarios are investigated. The basis for this empirical research is the gigantic Danish text archive Infomedia, and the results show the relative success of ‘invisible’ multi-word and polymorphemic expressions: Anglicisms using all-Danish material but calquing their English etymons and thus representing Anglo-American concepts in Danish disguise.

A Chinese telemedicine-dialogue dataset annotated for named entities

BackgroundA large collection of dialogues between patients and doctors must be annotated for medical named entities to build intelligence for telemedicine. However, since most patients involved in telemedicine deliver related named entities in informal and long multiword expressions, it is challenging to tag their telemedicine dialogue data. This study aims to address this issue.MethodsWith the telemedicine dialogue dataset for obstetrics and gynecology taken from haodf.com, we developed guidelines and followed a two-round procedure to tag six types of named entities, including disease, symptom, time, pharmaceutical, operation, and examination. Additionally, we developed four deep-learning models based on this dataset to establish a benchmark for named-entity recognition (NER).ResultsThe distilled obstetrics and gynecology dataset contains 2,383 consultations between doctors and patients, of which 13,411 sentences were from doctors, and 17,929 were from patients. With 63,560 named entities in total, the average number of characters per named entity is 4.33. The experimental results suggest that LatticeLSTM performs best on our dataset in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F score.ConclusionCompared with other datasets, this dataset offers three novel facets. This study offers intricately tagged long multiword expressions for medical named entities. Second, this study is one of the first attempts to mark temporal entities in a medical dataset. Third, this annotated dataset is balanced across the six types of labels, which we believe will play a considerable role in expanding telemedicine artificial intelligence.

A Generic Tool for Identification of Indo-Aryan Multi Word Expression

A Generic Tool for Identification of Indo-Aryan Multi Word Expression

MULTI-WORD PREPOSITIONAL EXPRESSIONS OF THE TYPE PREPOSITION V, NOUN, PREPOSITION K IN TECHNICAL TEXTS OF SLOVAK NATIONAL CORPUS

The article deals with multi-word prepositional expressions in technical texts of Slovak National Corpus of the type: preposition v + noun + preposition k. Data are collected from the subcorpus prim-10.0-public-prf that comprises texts of the popular scientific style, scientific articles, studies, encyclopaedias. It is expected that the highest frequency of multi-word prepositional expressions would be in this subcorpus of technical texts because of informing; announcing new information, results; introducing new approaches and discussing. From the frequency list of multi-word prepositional expressions of the above mentioned patterns, 15 expressions were identified to fulfill criteria for multi-word prepositions, i.e. vo vzťahu k(u), v protiklade k(u), v prístupe k(u), v pomere k(u), v opozícii k(u), v kontraste k(u), v smere k(u), v relácii k, v kontrapozícii k, v protipóle k, v kontrapunkte k, v protismere k, v súvzťažnosti k, v nepomere k, v súvislosti k. The expressions were classified and analysed according to three groups using lexico-semantic approach, i.e. neutral relationship, comparing relationship and opposite relationship. Development of terminology on multi-word prepositional expressions in the Slovak morphology is included.

'Her dreadful plight': A corpus-assisted analysis of the indexical and stance properties of <em>poor thing</em>

Curiously, the English multiword expression poor thing (henceforth PT) often refers to entities that are neither economically impoverished nor inanimate objects. By using a mixed-methods corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approach, we demonstrate that PT functions as an expression of affective stance based on evidence from two American English corpora. In cases where the social identities of speakers and referents can be determined, PT is frequently used by women and in reference to women, children, or animals. Additionally, the expression may refer to entities of low vitality due to illness or death. Our results indicate that PT conveys a complex social meaning by indexing a speaker’s compassionate stance alongside a referent’s misfortune, bundling together a set of (stereo)typically ‘disempowered’ personae. This analysis demonstrates the potential of corpus-based CDA investigations which analyze relatively infrequent lexical expressions that, nonetheless, have recognizable social meaning for speakers.

Identifying and Analyzing Reduplication Multiword Expressions in Hindi Text Using Machine Learning

The task of identifying and analyzing Reduplication Multiword Expressions (RMWEs) in Natural Language Processing (NLP) involves extracting repeated words from various text forms and classifying them into Onomatopoeic, non-Onomatopoeic, partial, or semantic types. With the increasing use of low-resource languages in news, opinions, comments, hashtags, reviews, posts, and journals, this study proposes a machine learning-based RMWE identification method for Hindi text. The method employs linguistic patterns and statistical data, along with a proposed threshold boundary detection in statistical filtering. The Jaccard distance of dissimilarity and Sorensen Dice Coefficient of Similarity are used for semantic relation analysis. The proposed approach was evaluated using the publicly available Hindi corpus from IITB, measuring performance between two consecutive thresholds with the lowest error and highest recall. This study proposes an effective method for Indian computational linguistics, with experimental results highlighting its viability and utility, and providing a blueprint for current procedures.

Negotiating Implicit Meaning on the Internet: A Case Study

Negotiating the meaning of words and sentences is a fundamental part of verbal interactions. This essay aims to examine a particular type of negotiation, that relating to the content of presuppositions, which are placed, together with the implicatures, in the phenomena of implicit communication. The research made use of automatic tools for querying empirical data: a database of lexical presupposition triggers for the Italian language, including approximately 20,000 entries (simple lexemes and multiword expressions) and the corpus of Computer Mediated Communication Web2Corpus_it, specifically in its public chat sections, which contains about 300,000 tokens. Quantitative data are provided in relation to the pragmatic function of negotiation, its initiation stage, and the types of presupposition triggers involved. In the context of the media characteristics of chats, which must be considered to discuss the results, the items of implicit meaning negotiation provide corpus-based evidence of the conditions under which presuppositions are available to the receiver’s monitoring of the meaning and consequent possible reaction.

Hand in Hand or Separate Ways: Navigation Devices and Nesting of Metonymic BODY PART Multiword Expressions in Monolingual English Learners’ Dictionaries

Abstract Despite a long history of research into phraseology and its practical applications, the representation of multiword expressions (henceforth MWEs) in dictionaries still remains unsettled. The paper singles out and investigates the lexicographic treatment of one thematically related group of MWEs, those that contain nominal forms of body part names. Body part MWEs have been chosen for the present study because they constitute a fairly homogenous group, as many of them are related by means of metonymic motivation, and are therefore expected to be treated in a fairly consistent way. The study examines and evaluates the representation of body part MWE in monolingual English learners’ dictionaries online from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. It focuses primarily on the arrangement of semantically related MWEs in the dictionary microstructure, and attention is also paid to navigation devices used to nest metonymically motivated body part MWEs. The paper proposes solutions that could be adopted in lexicographic practice so that semantic links between related body part MWEs become more apparent in the entry structure.