--- title: "Multiword expressions — Copestake 2002" description: "The paper describes how the LinGO English Resource Grammar (ERG), a broad bidirectional HPSG grammar, encodes multiword expressions (MWEs) in a database.…" authors: ["Ann Copestake", "Fabre Lambeau", "Aline Villavicencio", "Francis Bond", "Timothy Baldwin", "Ivan A. Sag", "Dan Flickinger"] year: 2002 venue: "Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/L02-1145/" doi: "10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g" licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2002-copestake-multiword-expressions-linguistic-precision-reusability/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2002-copestake-multiword-expressions-linguistic-precision-reusability/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2002](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2002/) / Multiword expressions: linguistic precision and reusability # Multiword expressions: linguistic precision and reusability **Authors:** [Ann Copestake](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/ann-copestake/), Fabre Lambeau, [Aline Villavicencio](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/aline-villavicencio/) et al. · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** LREC 2002: Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L02-1145](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1145/) · **Licence:** copyrighted (ELRA, all rights reserved; listed as [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) by the ACL Anthology) — summary only [**57** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W1603180818) OpenAlex · 2026-10-14 · [**23** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2002-copestake-multiword-expressions-linguistic-precision-reusability/cited-by/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L02-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1145/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1145.pdf) - [DOI 10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g](https://doi.org/10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1603180818) **Authors (7)** 1. [Ann Copestake](https://openalex.org/A5012396877) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0347-946X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/15379653) · h 33 · 5852 citations · 120 works 2. [Fabre Lambeau](https://openalex.org/A5061096908) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2083668851) · h 3 · 102 citations · 7 works 3. [Aline Villavicencio](https://openalex.org/A5053823442) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3731-9168) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145585242) · h 27 · 2157 citations · 201 works 4. [Francis Bond](https://openalex.org/A5044280576) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4973-8068) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145440721) · h 25 · 3348 citations · 205 works 5. [Timothy Baldwin](https://openalex.org/A5103085805) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4445-1386) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145465286) · h 54 · 12068 citations · 411 works 6. [Ivan A. Sag](https://openalex.org/A5025655522) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2393013) · h 46 · 20208 citations · 150 works 7. [Dan Flickinger](https://openalex.org/A5089106912) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7959-999X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3209288) · h 31 · 5030 citations · 90 works Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about The paper describes how the LinGO English Resource Grammar (ERG), a broad bidirectional HPSG grammar, encodes multiword expressions (MWEs) in a database. An MWE is listed only when the ordinary grammar rules and simplex entries fail on corpus data, so the grammar does not overgenerate. Verb-particle entries are split into a compositional case (tidy up) and an idiosyncratic case (look up), with a lexical redundancy rule that the database validates. Compound nouns are mostly left compositional, which causes ambiguity with the productive noun-noun rule. Decomposable idioms are hard to store as entries that must be kept in step with their words. The paper gives no accuracy figures; its contribution is the database design and the reuse argument. ## Ideas - I1. In `en/src/lexgen.rs`, store each verb-particle pair as one row with a particle slot and a flag for a compositional or an idiomatic reading. Measure: `en parse-eval` on EWT test, LAS on the sentences that contain a particle, with and without the rows. - I2. Mark established compounds (car park, Easter Sunday) so that the noun-noun rule does not fire on them. Measure: the `compound` arc accuracy on EWT test, and the count of compound readings per noun pair before and after. - I3. Keep non-decomposable idioms as words with spaces in `prag` expressions, and give decomposable ones their own rule. Measure: how many listed idioms the agreer rejects on a hand-checked set of frames from `world`. ## For Mova The chapter is [languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/), with [languages/en/14-irregular-verbs.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/14-irregular-verbs/) for the particle verbs and [languages/en/18-compounding-conversion-minor.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/18-compounding-conversion-minor/) for compounds. The code is `en/src/lexgen.rs` and `en/src/dict.rs`. The paper is NC: use it as a design source; any figure must come from EWT test. ## Cite The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g](https://doi.org/10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g) ```bibtex @inproceedings{copestake2002multiword, title = {{Multiword expressions: linguistic precision and reusability}}, author = {Copestake, Ann and Lambeau, Fabre and Villavicencio, Aline and Bond, Francis and Baldwin, Timothy and Sag, Ivan A. and Flickinger, Dan}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)}, year = {2002}, doi = {10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/323zr2e2bw6g} } ``` - [← previous Multiword Expressions: A Pain in the Neck for NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/idioms-2002-sag-multiword-expressions-pain-neck-nlp/) - [next → Parsing Akkadian Verbs with Prolog](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2002-macks-parsing-akkadian-verbs-prolog/) - [↑ back to papers of 2002](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2002/) ## References 6 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Copestake, Ann, 2002. Implementing typed feature structure grammars. CSLI Publications, Stanford. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Copestake%2C+Ann%2C+2002%2E+Implementing+typed+feature+structure+grammars%2E+CSLI+Publications%2C+Stanford%2E) 2. Copestake, Ann and Alex Lascarides, 1997. Integrating symbolic and statistical representations: The lexicon-pragmatics interface. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-97). Madrid. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Copestake%2C+Ann+and+Alex+Lascarides%2C+1997%2E+Integrating+symbolic+and+statistical+representations%3A+The+lexicon%2Dpragmatics+interface%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Thirty%2DFifth+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+f) 3. Fellbaum, Christiane, 1998. Towards a representation of idioms in WordNet. In Proceedings of the workshop on the Use of WordNet in Natural Language Processing Systems (Coling-ACL 1998). Montreal. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Fellbaum%2C+Christiane%2C+1998%2E+Towards+a+representation+of+idioms+in+WordNet%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+workshop+on+the+Use+of+WordNet+in+Natural+Language+Processing+Systems+%28Coling%2DACL+1998%29%2E+Montreal%2E) 4. Nunberg, Geoffrey, Ivan A. Sag, and Thomas Wasow, 1994. Idioms. Language, 70:491–538. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Nunberg%2C+Geoffrey%2C+Ivan+A%2E+Sag%2C+and+Thomas+Wasow%2C+1994%2E+Idioms%2E+Language%2C+70%3A491%E2%80%93538%2E) 5. Riehemann, Susanne, 2001. A Constructional Approach to Idioms and Word Formation. Ph.D. thesis, Stanford. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Riehemann%2C+Susanne%2C+2001%2E+A+Constructional+Approach+to+Idioms+and+Word+Formation%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Stanford%2E) 6. Villavicencio, Aline and Ann Copestake, 2002. Phrasal verbs and the LinGO-ERG. LinGO Working Paper No. 2002-01. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Villavicencio%2C+Aline+and+Ann+Copestake%2C+2002%2E+Phrasal+verbs+and+the+LinGO%2DERG%2E+LinGO+Working+Paper+No%2E+2002%2D01%2E)