A new multiword expression metric and its applications

Multiword Expressions (MWEs) appear frequently and ungrammatically in natural languages. Identifying MWEs in free texts is a very challenging problem. This paper proposes a knowledge-free, unsupervised, and language-independent Multiword Expression Distance (MED). The new metric is derived from an accepted physical principle, measures the distance from an n-gram to its semantics, and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on MWEs in two applications: question answering and named entity extraction.