A model for representing the semantics of MWEs: From lexical semantics to the semantic annotation of complex predicates

Abstract

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are sequences of words that pose a challenge to the computational processing of human languages due to their idiosyncrasies and the mismatch between their phrasal structure and their semantics. These idiosyncrasies are of lexical, morphosyntactic and semantic 11 nature, namely: non-compositionality, i.e., the meaning of the expression cannot be computed from the meanings of its constituents; discontinuity, i.e., alien elements may intervene; non-13 substitutability, i.e., at least one of the expression constituents is lexicalized and therefore, does not enter in alternations at the paradigmatic axis; and non-modifiability, in that they enter in syntactically 15 rigid structures, posing further constraints over modification, transformations, etc. The paper presents a model for representing MWEs at the level of semantics by taking into account all these inherent idiosyncrasies. The model assumes the form of a linguistic ontology and is applied to Greek verbal multi-word expressions (VMWEs); moreover, the semantics of the lexical entries under scrutiny is also represented via the semantics of their arguments based on corpus evidence. In this regard, modeling the semantics of VMWEs is placed in the lexicon-corpus interface.