Automatic identification of non-compositional multi-word expressions using latent semantic analysis

ABSTRACT

Making use of latent semantic analysis, we explore the hypothesis that local linguistic context can serve to identify multi-word expressions that have non-compositional meanings. We propose that vector-similarity between distribution vectors associated with an MWE as a whole and those associated with its constituent parts can serve as a good measure of the degree to which the MWE is compositional. We present experiments that show that low (cosine) similarity does, in fact, correlate with non-compositionality.

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