20. Computational phraseology: An overview

This chapter describes computational linguistic work which deals with phraseological units. This includes both computational support for human-use tools and resources in the field of phraseology, such as electronic learners’ dictionaries, and work in natural language processing aimed at the automatic treatment of phraseological units, for example in the analysis of texts, or in machine translation. It points to a number of issues which have received attention from computational linguists, but space prevents a detailed account of them. The issues are grouped around the phenomena targeted (Section 2), questions of how to represent phraseological units in lexicons and corpora (Section 3), as well as methods for automatically identifying and/or classifying phraseological units in texts (Section 4). The chapter gives an overview of the current approaches in these fields and points to relevant literature.