Computational Inflection of Multi-Word Units

A contrastive study of lexical approaches

Abstract

Similarly to simple words, compounds and other multi-word units (MWUs) are subject to inflection. A correct and exhaustive treatment of this issue has an important impact on natural language applications. However it raises some nontrivial questions such as: the role of separators in MWUs, morphological non-compositionality of MWUs, their syntactic and semantic variation, huge sizes of inflection paradigms in highly inflected languages, etc. Due to such problems, the inflectional description of MWUs must be, at least partly, lexicalized. We present a comparative review of eleven lexical approaches to this issue, with respect to linguistic properties of those units. The review is based on case studies of several natural languages. It allows us to put forward some recommendations for a cross-language standard morphological description of MWUs.