Design of a Multiword Expressions Database.

Abstract The paper proposes design of a generic database for multiword expressions (MWE), based on the requirements for implementation of the lexicon of Czech MWEs. The lexicon is aimed at different goals concerning lexicography, teaching Czech as a foreign language, and theoretical issues of MWEs as entities standing between lexicon and grammar, as well as for NLP tasks such as tagging and parsing, identification and search of MWEs, or word sense and semantic disambiguation. The database is designed to account for flexibility in morphology and word order, syntactic and lexical variants and even creatively used fragments. Current state of implementation is presented together with some emerging issues, problems and solutions.