Introduction to the special issue on multiword expressions: From theory to practice and use

Abstract

We are in 2013, and multiword expressions have been around for a while in the computational linguistics research community. Since the first ACL workshop on MWEs 12 years ago in Sapporo, Japan, much has been discussed, proposed, experimented, evaluated and argued about MWEs. And yet, they deserve the publication of a whole special issue of the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing. But what is it about multiword expressions that keeps them in fashion? Who are the people and the institutions who perform and publish groundbreaking fundamental and applied research in this field? What is the place and the relevance of our lively research community in the bigger picture of computational linguistics? Where do we come from as a community, and most importantly, where are we heading? In this introductory article, we share our point of view about the answers to these questions and introduce the articles that compose the current special issue.