Investigating the Effects of MWE Identification in Structural Topic Modelling

Dimitrios Kokkinakis, Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez, Sebastianus Bruinsma, Mia-Marie Hammarlin

Abstract: Multiword expressions (MWEs) are common word combinations which exhibit idiosyncrasies in various linguistic levels. For various downstream natural language processing applications and tasks, the identification and discovery of MWEs has been proven to be potentially practical and useful, but still challenging to codify. In this paper we investigate various, relevant to MWE, resources and tools for Swedish, and, within a specific application scenario, namely ‘vaccine skepticism’, we apply structural topic modelling to investigate whether there are any interpretative advantages of identifying MWEs.