--- title: "Multiword Expressions in the wild? The mwetoolkit comes in handy — Ramisch 2010" description: "The paper is a demonstration of mwetoolkit, a tool that extracts multiword expression (MWE) candidates from a… 9 references, cited by 25 papers here." authors: ["Carlos Ramisch", "Aline Villavicencio", "Christian Boitet"] year: 2010 venue: "Coling 2010: Demonstrations" source: "https://aclanthology.org/C10-3015/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ramisch-2010-multiword-expressions-wild-mwetoolkit-comes/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ramisch-2010-multiword-expressions-wild-mwetoolkit-comes/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2010](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2010/) / Multiword Expressions in the wild? The mwetoolkit comes in handy # Multiword Expressions in the wild? The mwetoolkit comes in handy **Authors:** [Carlos Ramisch](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/carlos-ramisch/), [Aline Villavicencio](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/aline-villavicencio/) and [Christian Boitet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/christian-boitet/) · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** Coling 2010: Demonstration Volume **Link:** [aclanthology.org/C10-3015](https://aclanthology.org/C10-3015/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only [**44** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W162154816) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · [**25** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ramisch-2010-multiword-expressions-wild-mwetoolkit-comes/cited-by/) of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Coling 2010: Demonstrations](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/C10-3/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/C10-3015/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C10-3015.pdf) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W162154816) **Authors (3)** 1. [Carlos Ramisch](https://openalex.org/A5024831674) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7466-9039) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2325592) · h 19 · 1,510 citations · 199 works 2. [Aline Villavicencio](https://openalex.org/A5053823442) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3731-9168) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145585242) · h 27 · 2,157 citations · 201 works 3. [Christian Boitet](https://openalex.org/A5109342706) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1794944) · h 18 · 1,044 citations · 257 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 is a demonstration of mwetoolkit, a tool that extracts multiword expression (MWE) candidates from a monolingual corpus. It first generates candidates from surface n-grams, then filters them with association measures such as Dice and PMI computed from n-gram counts. The authors run it in its standard setting on general English and discuss its pros and cons with selected examples. Its strength is that it is language independent and needs no parser. Its limit is that it uses only shallow information, so the lists need language tools for better precision. The paper gives no precision or recall figures. It cites the estimate that specialised lexica contain 50% to 70% multiword entries, and that 56.7% of the terms in the GENIA corpus are multi-word. ## Ideas - I2. Recursive filtering as the paper suggests: apply the association measure over increasing n-gram length, and keep a longer candidate only if it beats its parts. Measure: candidate precision against the unrecursive version on the same corpus. ## For Mova - I1. Candidate extraction for `en/src/lexgen.rs` from the Mova raw collection: count n-grams with BTreeMap, score them with Dice and PMI, and list the top candidates that are not yet in `data/lemmas.tsv`. Measure: precision of the top 500 candidates by hand, with two identical runs. - I3. Use the candidate list as a coverage probe for `en tok-eval`: how many EWT test multi-word units are absent from the lexicon. Measure: the share covered, before any lexicon change. The chapter is [languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/). The code is `en/src/lexgen.rs`, with a small Rust counter under `tools/` rather than a shell script. The paper's data is not named, and its numbers are not for Mova. Any precision claim must come from EWT test. ## Institutions [🎓**Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul** Porto Alegre · Brazil 3 works · 266 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universidade-federal-do-rio-grande-do-sul/) Also on the byline: [Pôle de recherche et d'enseignement supérieur Université de Grenoble](https://ror.org/04668v621). Topics[Idioms & multiword expressions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multiword-expressions/) ## Cite Cite as Carlos Ramisch, Aline Villavicencio and Christian Boitet. 2010. Multiword Expressions in the wild? The mwetoolkit comes in handy. Coling 2010: Demonstrations. The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{ramisch2010multiword, title = {{Multiword Expressions in the wild? The mwetoolkit comes in handy}}, author = {Carlos Ramisch, Aline Villavicencio and Christian Boitet}, booktitle = {Coling 2010: Demonstrations}, year = {2010}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/C10-3015/} } ``` - [← previous Generating Entailment Rules from FrameNet](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aharon-2010-generating-entailment-rules-framenet/) - [next → Turbo Parsers: Dependency Parsing by Approximate Variational Inference](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/martins-2010-turbo-parsers-dependency-parsing-approximate/) - [↑ back to papers of 2010](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2010/) ## References 9 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Evert, Stefan and Brigitte Krenn. 2005. Using small random samples for the manual evaluation of statistical association measures. Comp. Speech & Lang. Special issue on MWEs, 19(4):450–466. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Evert%2C+Stefan+and+Brigitte+Krenn%2E+2005%2E+Using+small+random+samples+for+the+manual+evaluation+of+statistical+association+measures%2E+Comp%2E+Speech+%26+Lang%2E+Special+issue+on+MWEs%2C+19%284%29%3A450%E2%80%93466%2E) 2. Jackendoff, Ray. 1997. Twistin’ the night away. Language, 73:534–559. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Jackendoff%2C+Ray%2E+1997%2E+Twistin%E2%80%99+the+night+away%2E+Language%2C+73%3A534%E2%80%93559%2E) 3. Pecina, Pavel. 2008. Reference data for czech collocation extraction. In Proc. of the LREC Workshop Towards a Shared Task for MWEs (MWE 2008), pages 11–14, Marrakech, Morocco, Jun. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Pecina%2C+Pavel%2E+2008%2E+Reference+data+for+czech+collocation+extraction%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+the+LREC+Workshop+Towards+a+Shared+Task+for+MWEs+%28MWE+2008%29%2C+pages+11%E2%80%9314%2C+Marrakech%2C+Morocco%2C+Jun%2E) 4. Ramisch, Carlos, Helena de Medeiros Caseli, Aline Villavicencio, André Machado, and Maria José Finatto. 2010a. A hybrid approach for multiword expression identification. In Proc. of the 9th PROPOR (PROPOR 2010), volume 6001 of LNCS (LNAI), pages 65–74, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Springer. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ramisch%2C+Carlos%2C+Helena+de+Medeiros+Caseli%2C+Aline+Villavicencio%2C+Andr%C3%A9+Machado%2C+and+Maria+Jos%C3%A9+Finatto%2E+2010a%2E+A+hybrid+approach+for+multiword+expression+identification%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+the+9th+PROPOR+%28PR) 5. Ramisch, Carlos, Aline Villavicencio, and Christian Boitet. 2010b. mwetoolkit: a framework for multiword expression identification. In Proc. of the Seventh LREC (LREC 2010), Malta, May. ELRA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ramisch%2C+Carlos%2C+Aline+Villavicencio%2C+and+Christian+Boitet%2E+2010b%2E+mwetoolkit%3A+a+framework+for+multiword+expression+identification%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+the+Seventh+LREC+%28LREC+2010%29%2C+Malta%2C+May%2E+ELRA%2E) 6. Ramisch, Carlos, Aline Villavicencio, and Christian Boitet. 2010c. Web-based and combined language models: a case study on noun compound identification. In Proc. of the 23th COLING (COLING 2010), Beijing, China, Aug. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ramisch%2C+Carlos%2C+Aline+Villavicencio%2C+and+Christian+Boitet%2E+2010c%2E+Web%2Dbased+and+combined+language+models%3A+a+case+study+on+noun+compound+identification%2E+In+Proc%2E+of+the+23th+COLING+%28COLING+2010%29%2C+Beij) 7. Sag, Ivan, Timothy Baldwin, Francis Bond, Ann Copestake, and Dan Flickinger. 2002. Multiword expressions: A pain in the neck for NLP. In Proc. of the 3rd CICLing (CICLing-2002), volume 2276/2010 of LNCS, pages 1–15, Mexico City, Mexico, Feb. Springer. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sag-2002-multiword-expressions-pain-neck-nlp/) 8. Seretan, Violeta. 2008. Collocation extraction based on syntactic parsing. Ph.D. thesis, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Seretan%2C+Violeta%2E+2008%2E+Collocation+extraction+based+on+syntactic+parsing%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+University+of+Geneva%2C+Geneva%2C+Switzerland%2E) 9. Smadja, Frank A. 1993. Retrieving collocations from text: Xtract. Comp. Ling., 19(1):143–177. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/smadja-1993-retrieving-collocations-text-xtract/)