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<Paper uid="W06-2410">
  <Title>Multiword Units in an MT Lexicon</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="75" end_page="76" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In the present paper we have highlighted the importance of multi-word units that are partially productive. Far from being peripheral, they appear to be ubiquitous particularly when viewed in a multilingual setting. Many of these expressions including such common phrases like a twenty year old woman may not be viewed as multi-word expressions at all until one realizes the syntactic/semantic constraints involved in their structure (e.g. *year old woman). More importantly, once their translation to another language is not entirely transparent (i.e. they cannot be rendered word by word), the crosslingual transfer must be registered. It is suitably done in traditional dictionaries through a single example, but in an MT system such reliance on the active contribution of the human user is not an option. Nor is exhaustive listing, as proved by this simple but extremely common example.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1">  We have shown how the use of local grammars can provide the flexibility required to cover the phenomena of partially productive multi-word units which form a continuum between frozen multi-word expressions and open-ended productive phrases defined by syntactic rules sensitive to part of speech categories only.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The local grammars were illustrated in some multilingual applications using the grammar development environment INTEX/NOOJ, which provide an intuitive and linguistically sophisticated tool to explore the use of the multi-word units in question.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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