Overview of MWE history, challenges, and horizons: standing at the 20th anniversary of the MWE workshop series via MWE-UD2024

TL;DR

This paper reviews the 20-year history of Multi-Word Expression (MWE) research, highlighting past topics, current challenges, and future directions to guide researchers and practitioners in the field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MWE research evolution, summarizes methodologies, discusses challenges, and outlines future perspectives for the field.

Findings

MWE research has evolved significantly over two decades.

Current challenges include standardization and integration of MWE in NLP systems.

Future directions involve interdisciplinary approaches and broader applications.

Abstract

Starting in 2003 when the first MWE workshop was held with ACL in Sapporo, Japan, this year, the joint workshop of MWE-UD co-located with the LREC-COLING 2024 conference marked the 20th anniversary of MWE workshop events over the past nearly two decades. Standing at this milestone, we look back to this workshop series and summarise the research topics and methodologies researchers have carried out over the years. We also discuss the current challenges that we are facing and the broader impacts/synergies of MWE research within the CL and NLP fields. Finally, we give future research perspectives. We hope this position paper can help researchers, students, and industrial practitioners interested in MWE get a brief but easy understanding of its history, current, and possible future.