Forwarded message from Archna below
---------- Forwarded message --------- Von: Archna Bhatia abhatia@ihmc.org Date: Sa., 11. Feb. 2023 um 01:57 Uhr Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Fwd: Deadline extension: 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2023) To: Ada Wan adawan919@gmail.com Cc: Kilian Evang kilian.evang@gmail.com, corpora@list.elra.info < corpora@list.elra.info>
Thanks, Ada. My point was not that the term “multiword expressions” predates the term “idioms/idiomatic expressions” but that the category of items, of which idioms is a subset, has been referred to as multiwords for a long time. It may not be the perfect terminology but there’s some shared understanding what kinds of expressions or constructions constitute this category labeled as multiwords/multiword expressions/multiword units. I would like to see strong evidence of better suitability of a new term to refer to this category before I adopt it.
BTW, I’m curious do you have examples in mind which belong to this category but show that wordhood might be a problematic notion? How frequent is this phenomenon?
Also regarding emojis etc, I’m curious: are there combinations of emojis that show some sort of idiosyncrasy when they cooccur? Or even combinations of emojis and textual words or other utterances which show such idiosyncratic behavior as we generally associate with “MWEs”? (It’s possible but I had not thought of it until now and it would be interesting to see that.)
BTW, are you planning on attending the MWE 2023 workshop? There would be a lot of opportunity to discuss this with researchers currently working on multiword expressions.
Thanks, Archna
On Feb 11, 2023, at 4:02 AM, Ada Wan adawan919@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Archna
"Idioms"/"Idiomatic expressions" are established terms in the study of language [1], with a longer history than MWE [2]. "Fixed", e.g. in "fixed phrases", is mentioned in, inter alia, [3], which was the earliest cite from the earliest work on MWEs in the ACL Anthology [4]. If I understand correctly, "MWEs" was a term so coined in order to establish a practice based on "words" (if anyone should view this differently, please do correct me here).
You're right, the task I suggested can be seen as orthogonal to distinguishing between lexical expressions or non-lexical expressions. I think it's important to document also the contexts surrounding expressions, instead of just picking expressions out and studying them in an isolated manner. It was just a suggestion for those who might be interested in building a multilingual parallel lexical database as well as those who might want to get a more holistic understanding of language while weaning oneself of "words" --- now that it's become even more obvious how superfluous the term/concept is.
[1] See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phraseme https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPhraseme&data=05%7C01%7Cabhatia%40ihmc.org%7Cc5cf46a96be042a8bf0a08db0bb6b042%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638116651510036218%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=54r5i9%2B%2FbEpySH7c52CPy6is3DR%2FyxeJ70EzF3VzcWg%3D&reserved=0 [2] "Idiomatic expression" is just another formulation of "idiom" (see https://www.thefreedictionary.com/idiomatic+expression https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thefreedictionary.com%2Fidiomatic%2Bexpression&data=05%7C01%7Cabhatia%40ihmc.org%7Cc5cf46a96be042a8bf0a08db0bb6b042%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638116651510036218%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=wPtWJaUV2OOhYppVr4iiVquLKbkWdCvzT18BOJBrgvk%3D&reserved=0).
According to Collins English Dictionary (accessed via https://www.thefreedictionary.com/idiom https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thefreedictionary.com%2Fidiom&data=05%7C01%7Cabhatia%40ihmc.org%7Cc5cf46a96be042a8bf0a08db0bb6b042%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638116651510036218%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=kIOsRYAQL34H1cxdRsv5b4z273zqF8OoRsCCSztXgSU%3D&reserved=0), "idiom" stems from the 16th century Latin idiōma, denoting "pecularity of language". [3] Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan A. Sag, and Thomas Wasow. 1994. Idioms. Language, 70:491–538. https://doi.org/10.2307/416483 https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.2307%2F416483&data=05%7C01%7Cabhatia%40ihmc.org%7Cc5cf46a96be042a8bf0a08db0bb6b042%7C2b38115bebad4aba9ea3b3779d8f4f43%7C1%7C0%7C638116651510036218%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=WrNafs6G%2Bd0eOVCj8XezwSKXDlK%2FTvygHRQyhfyXVqk%3D&reserved=0 (Many older references on "idioms" by linguists can be found therein.) [4] Ann Copestake, Fabre Lambeau, Aline Villavicencio, Francis Bond, Timothy Baldwin, Ivan A. Sag, and Dan Flickinger. 2002. Multiword expressions: linguistic precision and reusability. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02), Las Palmas, Canary Islands - Spain. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
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Hi Kilian
Sorry about my oversight on "item". I do think "item" could be better than "term" in this case, but it does carry a sense of "a single element", a more discrete "singleton". It's ok to combine it with "complex" to mitigate the sense of "singleton", but then "complex" as you suggested is dependent on morphology, which can be problematic.
Re "lexical": sure. (I think there have been so many different views/traditions/conventions among linguists and computational linguists in the past, we don't necessarily have to agree on how we or our definitions/methods might differ or might have differed, as long as we have the same goal now?)
One argument for "expressions" would be that they could include a sign (e.g. hand sign in motion).
So how about updating "MWEs" to: i. "lexical expressions", or ii. "lexical expressions (of one character or more when written)*", or iii. [i] or [ii] without "lexical", or iv. others?
* I'm trying to incorporate how expressions with emojis would/should be treated too.
------------------------------
What do you all think?
Thanks and best Ada
On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 10:58 AM Kilian Evang via Corpora < corpora@list.elra.info> wrote:
Forwarded message from Archna below
---------- Forwarded message --------- Von: Archna Bhatia abhatia@ihmc.org Date: Do., 9. Feb. 2023 um 19:58 Uhr Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Deadline extension: 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2023) To: Ada Wan adawan919@gmail.com, kilian Evang kilian.evang@gmail.com Cc: Mike Scott mike@lexically.net, mweworkshop2023@googlegroups.com < mweworkshop2023@googlegroups.com>, corpora@list.elra.info < corpora@list.elra.info>
Thanks, Ada. I think using the terms “fixed” and “idiomatic” make the category appear more restrictive, and would need qualifications such as “fixed” is a relative term here, etc. With “multiwords/multiword expressions” also, there are stipulations (the notion of wordhood may not be applicable to every single language and in the same way) but since the term has been used for a long while, there is a bit of a shared understanding of this term, including about these stipulations. I am open to better terminology. Using just “expressions”, however, seems too vague and loses some generalizations about the idiosyncrasies that "multiword expressions” demonstrate. Every expression in not the same, “multiword expressions” show characteristics different from other expressions. I understand there is some fluidity also there when trying to distinguish between multiwords and non multiword expressions.
There are so many angles that one could look at language from. I don’t see anything wrong with the view that studies expressions covering all aspects as you suggest without distinguishing between expressions based on notions of wordhood. The task you suggest will help in developing understanding about language and how languages are similar or different and how they are used. I don’t think it disqualifies efforts that distinguish between “multiword expressions” and non-multiword expressions though, and the idiosyncrasies are not limited to morphology/syntax, idiosyncrasies are found in other linguistic aspects too when characterizing "multiword expressions”.
~ Archna
On Feb 9, 2023, at 11:17 AM, Ada Wan adawan919@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Archna, hi Kilian, hi all
Thanks for your replies.
TLDR on my part: I'd be fine going with "expressions" (instead of "fixed/idiomatic expressions"). Neither "word" nor "morphology/syntax" (apart from the ordering of elements and/or sequential patterns) is necessary in the analyses of such.
More specifically:
[@Archna] Re "fixed/idiomatic expressions": I don't think it matters much whether they are "fixed" or "idiomatic". A "fixed expression" is one that is usually more impervious to (lexical) change. One can measure this quality in a longitudinal study, e.g. in relation to other aspects of language change etc.. Re how "fixed" is "fixed": it's relative, much like many other aspects of language studies. By "idiomatic", one could mean that there is an element of idiosyncrasy (as "idiom"/"idioma").
The message that I am trying to get across is that "word" is a superflous category in the study of language. Would you mind please justifying why you need "words"?
The same goes for morphology, actually. In essence, morphological analyses involve selective decomposition, not decomposition of all decomposable units. Hence if one is only accounting for variations within an expression as a ((sub-)character) sequence involving "morphemes" (assuming definable rigorously) and discounting the changes in other parts of the sequence, that would be an incomplete analysis of the expression. Instead, one can just refer to expressions as "expressions", as e.g. sequences/strings of various lengths/vocabs in (sub-)characters --- such an account is also more flexible and accommodating to diverse languages/registers/modalities.
A study of "expressions" can cover all other aspects --- not just lexical but also functional ones. One doesn't need to incorporate/impose any ad hoc notions of "wordhood" in these studies.
Suggestion: I believe there are many more interesting tasks in this area, instead of trying to find/define "words" within expressions, or to "parse" them according to some structuralist assumptions (i.e. morphologically/syntactically). For example, the community could start (some multi-year project) building an international multilingual parallel (note: not everything would be parallelizable) database of all expressions and terminologies ever existed with contextual (historical/cultural/social) information and start verifying their sources and status of current use. (Just be aware, though, that one is not reinforcing values that shouldn't be further emphasized / transfered to posterity --- as an ethical consideration. So if something is in the grey area now, document clearly what the current attitudes towards a certain value are, so posterity can look back and evaluate with respect to their point of view.)
Counter questions to Archna: What are the motivations behind your suggestion to access/interpret language using "words"? How do you define "words" and justify the sufficiency/necessity of morphology/syntax in relation to the study of these expressions, esp. when the morphological decomposition of these expressions is arbitrary and helps little (or not at all) with explanation or prediction?
Re "complex lexical terms", @Kilian: I'm just wondering what kind of terms that would be considered "terms" that wouldn't be considered lexical (I was tempted to add "lexical" to "expressions" as well, but thought that might be a bit redundant)? It depends on how one defines "terms", of course. And how "complex" are expressions really? They are just more calcified units after all, aren't they? (Why do we/some always seem to want to add the term "complex" to everything? Things that aren't "complex" are also worthy of studying!)
Curious what you think...
Thanks and best Ada
Why I'm advocating #noWords: Fairness in Representation for Multilingual NLP: Insights from Controlled Experiments on Conditional Language Modeling https://openreview.net/forum?id=-llS6TiOew
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On Thu, Feb 9, 2023 at 3:27 PM Mike Scott via Corpora < corpora@list.elra.info> wrote:
I must say I'm perfectly happy with "multi-word expression", or "multi-word unit".
I feel sympathy with Archna's post (and incidentally wish Archna didn't have to go through a friend!) Cheers -- Mike
--
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-- Archna Bhatia, Ph.D. Research Scientist, Institute for Human & Machine Cognition 15 SE Osceola Ave, Ocala, FL 34471 (352) 387-3061
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Kilian Evang