Estimating the Number of Concepts
Abstract
Most Natural Language Processing systems have been built around the idea of a word being something found between white spaces and punctuation. This is a normal and efficient way to proceed. Tasks such as Word Sense Disambigua-tion, Machine Translation, or even indexing rarely go beyond the single word. Language models used in NLP applications are built on the word, with a few multiword expressions taken as exceptions. But future NLP systems will neces-sarily venture out into the uncharted areas of multiword expressions. The di-mensions and the topology of multiword concepts are unknown: Are there hun-dreds of thousands or tens of millions? Which words participate in multiword concepts and which do not? As the corpus grows, will their number keep on increasing? In this paper, I estimate the number of multiword concepts that are used in English, systematically probing the Web as our corpus.
Domains
Computation and Language [cs.CL]
Origin : Files produced by the author(s)
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