A Corpus Study of Verbal Multiword Expressions in Brazilian Portuguese

摘要

Verbal multiword expressions (VMWEs) such as to make ends meet require special attention in NLP and linguistic research, and annotated corpora are valuable resources for studying them. Corpora annotated with VMWEs in several languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, were made freely available in the PARSEME shared task. The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze this corpus in terms of the characteristics of annotated VMWEs in Brazilian Portuguese. First, we summarize and exemplify the criteria used to annotate VMWEs. Then, we analyze their frequency, average length, discontinuities and variability. We further discuss challenging constructions and borderline cases. We believe that this analysis can improve the annotated corpus and its results can be used to develop systems for automatic VMWE identification.