The Challenges of Syntactic Descriptions of MultiwordExpressions in Electronic Lexicography

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the way in which the morphosyntactic properties of multiword expressions are represented in lexical resources to support Natural Language Processing downstream applications. Starting from an up-to-date and A comprehensive overview of the existing lexica dedicated to multiword expressions and containing their syntactic description, we outline the current state of play in encoding syntactic information about multiword expressions (internal structure, argument structure, word order, discontinuity, and verb alternations). We also discuss the relevance of the syntactic description of multiword expressions for several Natural Language Processing tasks. Our work contributes to the literature that fosters improvements in both the development and deployment of multiword expression lexica to ensure that they can support future Natural Language Processing innovations are more effective.