Identification of multiword expressions in the brWaC

Although corpus size is a well known factor that affects the performance of many NLP tasks, for many languages large freely available corpora are still scarce. In this paper we describe one effort to build a very large corpus for Brazilian Portuguese, the brWaC, generated following the Web as Corpus kool yinitiative. To indirectly assess the quality of the resulting corpus we examined the impact of corpus origin in a specific task, the identification of Multiword Expressions with association measures, against a standard corpus. Focusing on nominal compounds, the expressions obtained from each corpus are of comparable quality and indicate that corpus origin has no impact on this task.