From Chinese Word Segmentation to Extraction of Constructions: Two Sides of the Same Algorithmic Coin
Jean-Pierre Colson · Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) · 2018
This paper presents the results of two experiments carried out within the framework of computational construction grammar. Starting from the constructionist point of view that there are just constructions in language, including lexical ones, we tested the validity of a clustering algorithm that was primarily designed for MWE extraction, the cpr-score (Colson, 2017), on Chinese word segmentation. Our results indicate a striking recall rate of 75 percent without any special adaptation to Chinese or to the lexicon, which confirms that there is some similarity between extracting MWEs and CWS. Our second experiment also suggests that the same methodology might be used for extracting more schematic or abstract constructions, thereby providing evidence for the statistical foundation of construction grammar.