How Many Multiword Expressions do People Know?

What is a multiword expression (MWE) and how many are there? Mark Liberman gave a great invited talk at ACL-89, titled “How Many Words Do People Know?” where he spent the entire hour questioning the question. Many of the same questions apply to multiword expressions. What is a word? An expression? What is many? What is a person? What does it mean to know? Rather than answer these questions, this article will use them as Liberman did, as an excuse for surveying how such issues are addressed in a variety of fields: computer science, Web search, linguistics, lexicography, educational testing, psychology, statistics, and so on.

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