An unsupervised method for automatic validation of verbal phraseological units

Abstract

In this paper we present an unsupervised technique for validating the existence of verbal phraseological units in raw text. This technique employs the concept of internal and contextual attraction which basically considers a mathematical formula based on co-occurrence of terms inside and outside of the terms considered to be part of a verbal phraseological unit. The experiments carried out using a corpus of news stories report a 60% of accuracy, which highlights the challenging task of automatic validation of verbal phraseological units in raw texts.