Computational Inflection of Multi-Word Units, a contrastive study of lexical approaches

Abstract

Similarly to simple words, compounds and other multi-word units (MWUs) 

are subject to in?ection. A correct and exhaustive treatment of this issue has 

an important impact on natural language applications. However it raises some 

nontrivial questions such as: the role of separators in MWUs, morphological 

non-compositionality of MWUs, their syntactic and semantic variation, huge 

sizes of in?ection paradigms in highly in?ected languages, etc. Due to such 

problems, the in?ectional description of MWUs must be, at least partly, lexi- 

calized. We present a comparative review of eleven lexical approaches to this 

issue, with respect to linguistic properties of those units. The review is based 

on case studies of several natural languages. It allows us to put forward some 

recommendations for a cross-language standard morphological description of 

MWUs.