Article published In: Lingvisticæ Investigationes
Vol. 38:1 (2015) ► pp.73–110
The Ontological Semantic treatment of multiword expressions
Published online: 18 September 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.38.1.03mcs
https://doi.org/10.1075/li.38.1.03mcs
This paper describes, and presents a formal evaluation of, the Ontological Semantic approach to automatically analyzing multiword expressions. It shows how multiword expressions can be lexically recorded and processed in the same way as compositional argument-taking words. It suggests that the component modeling strategies are psychologically plausible and hold promise for supporting the development of sophisticated, language-endowed intelligent agents.
Keywords: multiword expressions, idioms, phraseology, computational semantics
References (30)
Al-Haj, H., Itai, A., & Wintner, S. (2014). Lexical representation of multiword expressions in morphologically-complex languages. International Journal of Lexicography, 27(2), 130–170.
Beale, S., Nirenburg, S., & Mahesh, K. (1995). Semantic analysis in the Mikrokosmos machine translation project. In
Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Natural Language Processing
, Bangkok, Thailand.
Cacciari, C., & Tabossi, P. (1993). Idioms: Processing, structure and interpretation. Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, Inc.
Calzolari, N., Fillmore, C., Grishman, R., Ide, N., Lenci, A., MacLeod, C., & Zampolli, A. (2002). Towards best practice for multiword expressions in computational lexicons. In
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002) (pp. 1934–1940), Las Palmas, Canary Islands.
de Marneffe, M., MacCartney, B., & Manning, C.D. (2006). Generating typed dependency parses from phrase structure parses. In
Proceedings of The Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)
.
Fillmore, C., Kay, P., & O’Connor, C. (1988). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions: The case of let alone
. Language, 641, 501–538.
Fillmore, C., Wooters, C., & Baker, C. (2001). Building a large lexical databank which provides deep semantics. In B. Tsou & O. Kwong (Eds.),
Proceedings of the 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation
, Hong Kong, 2001.
Gildea, G., & Jurafsky, D. (2002). Automatic labeling of semantic roles. Computational Linguistics, 28(3), 245–288.
Grégoire, N. (2010). DuELME: A Dutch electronic lexicon of multiword expressions. Language Resources and Evaluation, 441, 23–39.
Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., & Palmer, M. (2008). A large-scale classification of English verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal, 42(1), 21–40. Springer Netherland.
Klein, D., & Manning, C.D. (2003a). Fast exact inference with a factored model for natural language parsing. In
Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15 (NIPS 2002)
, (pp. 3–10). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
. (2003b). Accurate unlexicalized parsing. In
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- vol. 11.
Manning, C.D., Surdeanu, M., Bauer, J., Finkel, J., Bethard, S.J. & McClosky, D. (2014). The Stanford CoreNLP natural language processing toolkit. In
Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
, 55–60.
McShane, M., Fantry, G., Beale, S., Nirenburg, S., & Jarrell, B. (2007). Disease interaction in cognitive simulations for medical training. In
Proceedings of MODSIM 2007
(pp. 74–80). Virginia Beach, Sept. 11-13, 2007.
McShane, M., Beale, S., Nirenburg, S., Jarrell, B., & Fantry, G. (2012). Inconsistency as diagnostic tool in a society of intelligent agents. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIIM), 55(3), 137–148.
McShane, M., & Nirenburg, S. (2013). Use of ontology, lexicon and fact repository for reference resolution in Ontological Semantics. In A. Oltramari, P. Vossen, L. Qin, & E. Hovy (Eds.), New trends of research in ontologies and lexical resources: Ideas, projects, systems (pp. 157–185). Springer.
McShane, M., Nirenburg, S., & Beale, S. (In press). Language understanding with Ontological Semantics. Advances in Cognitive Systems.
McShane, M., Beale, S., & Babkin, P. (2014). Nominal compound interpretation by intelligent agents. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT), vol. 101. 1–36. July.
Nirenburg, S., McShane, M., & Beale, S. (2008). A simulated physiological/cognitive “double agent”. In J. Beal, P. Bello, N. Cassimatis, M. Coen, & P. Winston (Eds.), Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium, Naturally Inspired Cognitive Architectures. Washington, D.C., Nov. 7–9. AAAI technical report FS-08-06, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.
Przepiórkowski, A., Hajnicz, E., Patejuk, A., & Woliński, M. (2014). Extended phraseological information in a valence dictionary for NLP applications. In
Proceedings of the Workshop on Lexical and Grammatical Resources for Language Processing
. Association for Computational Linguistics and Dublin City University, 83–91.
Raskin, V., & Nirenburg, S. (1998). An applied Ontological Semantic microtheory of adjective meaning for natural language processing. Machine Translation, 13(2-3), 135–227.
Savary, A. (2008). Computational inflection of multi-word units, a contrastive study of lexical approaches. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 11, 1–53.
Schone, P., & Jurafsky, D. (2001). Is knowledge-free induction of multiword unit dictionary headwords a solved problem? In
Proceedings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
, Pittsburgh, PA.
Sharoff, S. (2004). What is at stake: A case study of Russian expressions starting with a preposition. In
Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Multiword Expressions: Integrating Processing
(pp. 17–23). July.
Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
McShane, Marjorie, Sergei Nirenburg, Valerio Basile, Tommaso Caselli & Daniele P. Radicioni
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. 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.