Cover not available
Part of
Computational Phraseology
Edited by Gloria Corpas Pastor and Jean-Pierre Colson
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 24] 2020
► pp. 207–224

Verbal collocations and pronominalisation

| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva
| University of Geneva
Precise identification of multiword expressions (MWEs) is an important qualitative step for several NLP applications, including machine translation. Since most MWEs cannot be translated literally, failure to identify them yields, at best, inaccurate translation. While some expressions are completely frozen and thus can be listed as compound words, others display a sometimes very large degree of syntactic flexibility.
In this chapter, we argue not only that structural information is necessary for an adequate treatment of collocations, but also that the detection of collocations can be useful for the parser. For instance, it is very useful for solving part-of-speech ambiguities and also some attachment ambiguities. We therefore claim that collocation identification and parsing are interrelated processes.
Section 2 describes the two processes of parsing and collocation detection and their interaction, (i) when and how the collocation identification process is triggered during parsing, and (ii) how the identification of a collocation helps the parser. In Section 3 we describe how anaphora resolution has been implemented in our parsing system, to handle cases where the antecedent and the pronoun are within the same sentence or in adjacent sentences. Section 4 focuses on more intricate cases of verbal collocations where their nominal element has been pronominalised, in the form of a relative pronoun or a personal pronoun. Verb-object collocations with a relative pronoun are extremely frequent and relatively easy to handle for a “deep” parser. In most cases, the relative clause is directly attached to the noun which is part of the collocation. Collocations in which the nominal element takes the form of a personal pronoun are much harder to deal with, as they depend on the process of anaphora resolution, a very challenging task. The last section describes an evaluation of the collocation detection procedure, enhanced with anaphora resolution using a corpus of newspaper articles of about 10 million words.
Keywords: collocation, multiword expressions, anaphora resolution, pronominalisation, deep parsing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Parsing and collocation detection
  • 3.Anaphora resolution
  • 4.Verbal collocations and pronominalisation
  • 5.Experimental results
    • 5.1Evaluation methodology
    • 5.2Evaluation results
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.24.11weh
References (22)
References
Butt, M., King, T. H., Niño, M.-E., & Segond, F. (1999). A Grammar Writers Cookbook. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1977). On wh-movement. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow, & A. Akmajian (Eds.), Formal Syntax. Academic Press.Google Scholar
(1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Foris Publications.Google Scholar
Dunning, T. (1993). Accurate methods for the statistics of surprise and coincidence. Computational Linguistics, 19(1), 61–74.Google Scholar
Grosz, B., Joshi, A., & Weinstein, S. (1995). Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2), 203–225.Google Scholar
Haegeman, L. (1994). Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. BlackwellGoogle Scholar
Heid, U. (2004). On the presentation of collocations in monolingual dictionaries. In Proceedings of the eleventh EURALEX International Congress Vol. II (pp. 729–738). Lorient, France.Google Scholar
Hobbs, J. (1978). Resolving pronoun references. Lingua, 44, 311–338. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kibble, R. (2001). A Reformulation of Rule 2 of Centering Theory. Computational Linguistics, 27(4), 579–587. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lappin, S., & Leass, H. (1994). An algorithm for pronominal anaphora resolution, Computational Linguistics, 20(4), 535–561.Google Scholar
Laurent, D. (2001). De la résolution des anaphores. Internal report. Synapse Developpement.Google Scholar
Mitkov, R. (2002). Anaphora Resolution. Longman.Google Scholar
Nerima, L., & Wehrli, E. (2015). Résolution d’anaphores appliquée aux collocations: une évaluation préliminair. In Actes de la 20e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (pp. 772–778). Les Sables d’Olonne, France.Google Scholar
Sag I. A., Baldwin, T., Bond, F., Copestake, A., & Flickinger, D. (2002). Multiword Expressions: A Pain in the Neck for NLP. In A. Gelbukh (Ed.), CICLING02: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (pp. 1–15). Springer.Google Scholar
Seretan, V. (2011). Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction. Springer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seretan, V., & Wehrli, E. (2009) Multilingual collocation extraction with a syntactic parser. Language Resources and Evaluation. Special Issue on Multilingual Language Resources and Interoperability, 43(1), 71–85. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stone, M., & Doran, C. (1996). Paying heed to collocations. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation (pp. 91–100). Herstmonceux, Sussex, England.Google Scholar
Wehrli, E. (2007). Fips, a “deep” linguistic multilingual parser. In Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Workshop on Deep Linguistic Processing (pp. 120–127). Prague, Czech-Republic.Google Scholar
(2014). The relevance of collocations for parsing. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions (pp. 26–32). Gothenburg: EACL.Google Scholar
Wehrli, E., Seretan, V., & Nerima, L. (2010). Sentence analysis and collocation identification. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Theory to Application (pp. 27–35). Beijing: Coling.Google Scholar
Wehrli, E., & Nerima, L. (2015). The Fips multilingual parser. In N. Gala, R. Rapp, & G. Bel-Enguix (Eds.), Language Production, Cognition, and the Lexicon. Series Text, Speech and Language Technology, 48 (pp. 473–489). Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilks, Y. (1975). Preference Semantics. In E. Keenan (Ed.), The Formal Semantics of Natural Language (pp. 329–350). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Wehrli, Eric
2022. Collocations in Parsing and Translation. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 5 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.