Spain

This paper is a system description of HMSid, officially sent to the PARSEME Shared Task 2020 for one language (French), in the open track. It also describes HMSid2, sent to the organizers of the workshop after the deadline and using the same methodology but in the closed track. Both systems do not rely on machine learning, but on computational corpus linguistics. Their score for unseen MWEs is very promising, especially in the case of HMSid2, which would have received the best score for unseen MWEs in the French closed track.

COLING 2020

HMSid and HMSid2 at PARSEME Shared Task 2020: Computational Corpus Linguistics and unseen-in-training MWEs


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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

technical paper

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

In this work, we present the construction of multilingual parallel corpora with annotation of multiword expressions (MWEs). MWEs include verbal MWEs (vMWEs) defined in the PARSEME shared task that have a verb as the head of the studied terms. The annotated vMWEs are also bilingually and multilingually aligned manually. The languages covered include English, Chinese, Polish, and German. Our original English corpus is taken from the PARSEME shared task in 2018. We performed machine translation of this source corpus followed by human post editing and annotation of target MWEs. Strict quality control was applied for error limitation, i.e., each MT output sentence received first manual post editing and annotation plus second manual quality rechecking. One of our findings during corpora preparation is that accurate translation of MWEs presents challenges to MT systems. To facilitate further MT research, we present a categorisation of the error types encountered by MT systems in performing MWE related translation. To acquire a broader view of MT issues, we selected four popular state-of-the-art MT models for comparisons namely: Microsoft Bing Translator, GoogleMT, Baidu Fanyi and DeepL MT. Because of the noise removal, translation post editing and MWE annotation by human professionals, we believe our AlphaMWE dataset will be an asset for cross-lingual and multilingual research, such as MT and information extraction. Our multilingual corpora are available as open access at github.com/poethan/AlphaMWE

AlphaMWE: Construction of Multilingual Parallel Corpora with MWE Annotations

We describe the Seen2Unseen system that participated in edition 1.2 of the PARSEME shared task on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). The identification of VMWEs that do not appear in the provided training corpora (called unseen VMWEs) – with a focus here on verb-noun VMWEs – is based on mutual information and lexical substitution or translation of seen VMWEs. We present the architecture of the system, report results for 14
languages, and propose an error analysis.

All Roads do not Lead to Unseen Verb-Noun VMWEs

When repairing a device, humans employ a series of tools that corresponds to the arrangement of the device components. Such sequences of tool usage can be learned from repair manuals, so that at each step, having observed the previously applied tools, a sequential model can predict the next required tool. In this paper, we improve the tool prediction performance of such methods by additionally taking the hierarchical relationships among the tools into account. To this aim, we build a taxonomy of tools with hyponymy and hypernymy relations from the data by decomposing all multi-word expressions of tool names. We then develop a sequential model that performs a binary prediction for each node in the taxonomy. The evaluation of the method on a dataset of repair manuals shows that encoding the tools with the constructed taxonomy and using a top-down beam search for decoding increases the prediction accuracy and yields an interpretable taxonomy as a potentially valuable byproduct.

Hierarchy-aware Learning of Sequential Tool Usage via Semi-automatically Constructed Taxonomies

We introduce CollFrEn, a language resource focused on collocations for two languages: English and French. We compiled, categorized, enriched and disambiguated thousands of collocations, and we also release corpus samples where they occur, as well as dedicated embedding space.

CollFrEn: Rich Bilingual English--French Collocation Resource

Through comparison with several human-annotated reference sets, we find word2vec to be substantively superior to GloVe for unsupervised measurement
of the semantic compositionality of MWE candidates. We also demonstrate that a sample of 10% of sentences in the English Wikipedia can provide a conveniently tractable corpus with only moderate reduction in the quality of outputs.

Comparing word2vec and GloVe for Automatic Measurement of MWE Compositionality

In this presentation, we explore the categories of VMWEs that exist in Irish, including some of the challenges with annotating these categories. We present the resulting corpora and examine the results of the PARSEME Shared Task for Irish.

Annotating Verbal MWEs in Irish for the PARSEME Shared Task 1.2

This paper describes the ERMI system submitted to the closed track of the PARSEME shared task 2020 on automatic identification of verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs). ERMI is an embedding-rich bidirectional LSTM-CRF model, which takes into account the embeddings of the word, its POS tag, dependency relation, and its head word. The results are reported for 14 languages, where the system is ranked 1st in the general cross-lingual ranking of the closed track systems, according to the Unseen MWE-based F1.

Embedding-Rich Multiword Expression Identification

This paper describes the TRAVIS system built for the PARSEME Shared Task 2020 on semi-supervised identification of verbal multiword expressions. TRAVIS is a fully feature-independent model, relying only on the contextual embeddings. We have participated with two variants of TRAVIS, TRAVIS-multi and TRAVIS-mono, where the former employs multilingual contextual embeddings and the latter uses monolingual ones. Our systems are ranked second and third among seven submissions in the open track, respectively. A thorough comparison of both systems on eight languages reveals that despite the strong performance of multilingual contextual embeddings across all languages, language-specific contextual embeddings exhibit much better generalization capabilities.


How good is (m)BERT at seeing the unseen?


This paper presents our work on the refinement and improvement of the Serbian language part of Hurtlex, a multilingual lexicon of words to hurt. We pay special attention to adding Multi-word expressions that can be seen as abusive, as such lexical entries are very important in obtaining good results in a plethora of abusive language detection tasks. We use Serbian morphological dictionaries as a basis for data cleaning and MWE dictionary creation. A connection to other lexical and semantic resources in Serbian is outlined and building of abusive language detection systems based on that connection is foreseen.

Multi-word Expressions for Abusive Speech Detection in Serbian

This paper describes a semi-supervised system that jointly learns verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs) and dependency parse trees as an auxiliary task. The model benefits from pre-trained multilingual BERT. BERT hidden layers are shared among the two tasks and we introduce an additional linear layer to retrieve VMWE tags. The dependency parse tree prediction is modelled by a linear layer and a bilinear one plus a tree CRF on top of BERT. The system has participated in the open track of the PARSEME shared task 2020 and ranked first in terms of F1-score in identifying unseen VMWEs as well as VMWEs in general, averaged across all 14 languages.


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AlphaMWE: Construction of Multilingual Parallel Corpora with MWE Annotations

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Edition 2.0 of the PARSEME shared task on multilingual identification and para- phrasing of multiword expressions

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AlphaMWE: Construction of Multilingual Parallel Corpora with MWE Annotations

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Edition 2.0 of the PARSEME shared task on multilingual identification and para- phrasing of multiword expressions

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