DuELME: A Dutch electronic lexicon of multiword expressions

Abstract

This article describes the design and implementation of a Dutch Electronic Lexicon of Multiword Expressions (DuELME). DuELME describes the core properties of over 5,000 Dutch multiword expressions. This article gives an overview of the decisions made in order to come to a standard lexical representation and discusses the description fields this representation comprises. We discuss the approach taken, which is innovative since it is based on the Equivalence Class Method (ECM). It is shown that introducing parameters to the ECM optimizes the method. The selection of the lexical entries and their properties is corpus-based. We describe the extraction of candidate expressions from corpora and discuss the selection criteria of the lexical entries. Moreover, we present the results of an evaluation of the standard representation in Alpino, a Dutch dependency parser. © The Author(s) 2009.