Lexicalisation of Polish and English word combinations: an empirical study

Abstract One of the main research questions concerning multi-word expressions (MWEs) is which of them are transparent word combinations created ad hoc and which are multi-word lexical units (MWUs). In this paper, we use selected corpus-linguistic and machine-learning methods to determine which lexicalization criteria guide Polish and English lexicographers in deciding which MWEs (bigrams such as adjective+noun and noun+noun combinations) should be treated as lexical units recorded in dictionaries as MWUs. We analyzed two samples: MWEs extracted from Polish and English monolingual dictionaries, and those created by the annotators, and tested two custom-designed criteria, i.e., intuition and paraphrase, also by using statistical methods (measures of collocational strength: PMI and Jaccard). We revealed that Polish lexicographers have a tendency not to include compositional MWEs as lexical entries in their dictionaries and that the criteria of paraphrase and intuition are important for them: if MWEs are not clearly and unambiguously paraphrasable and compositional, then they are recorded in dictionaries. We found that in contrast to Polish lexicographers English lexicographers tend to record also compositional and partly compositional MWEs.