Human Associations Help to Detect Conventionalized Multiword Expressions
This work addresses the challenge of identifying conventionalized phrases for linguists and NLP researchers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing association methods.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting conventionalized multiword expressions by using human associations from native speakers, showing that phrases where component words frequently associate with each other or have low entropy and low intersection in associations can be identified as conventionalized, with experiments conducted in Russian.
In this paper we show that if we want to obtain human evidence about conventionalization of some phrases, we should ask native speakers about associations they have to a given phrase and its component words. We have shown that if component words of a phrase have each other as frequent associations, then this phrase can be considered as conventionalized. Another type of conventionalized phrases can be revealed using two factors: low entropy of phrase associations and low intersection of component word and phrase associations. The association experiments were performed for the Russian language.