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·2026 OPEN ACCESS

Sahara Tokenizers at PARSEME 2.0 Subtask 1: Combining Contextual Embed-dings with Structural Decoding for Multi-Word Expression Detection

Association for Computational Linguistics 2026 , Yunus Karatepe , Zeynep Kırımlı , Begüm Özbay YTU , Mert Sülük

Underline Science Inc.

Abstract

Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) pose a significant challenge for natural language processing systems due to their idiosyncratic semantic and syntactic properties. This paper describes our system for the PARSEME 2.0 Shared Task on automatic identification of verbal MWEs across 17 typologically diverse languages. Our approach combines multilingual BERT with explicit Part-of-Speech (POS) feature injection through a dual-head architecture that jointly performs BIO-based identification and category classification. We further investigate extensions, including Conditional Random Field (CRF) decoding for structured prediction, focal loss for addressing class imbalance, and model ensembling for improving discontinuous MWE detection. Our official submission achieves a global MWE-based F1 score of 48.39%, securing second place in the shared task. Ablation studies reveal a strong synergy between POS features and CRF decoding, with the combined approach yielding the best single-model performance. Furthermore, ensembling models trained with different objectives improves both overall F1 score and discontinuous MWE scores, demonstrating the importance of training diversity for capturing non-adjacent syntactic patterns.

Keywords

Conditional random field Decoding methods Task (project management) Feature (linguistics) Identification (biology) Field (mathematics) Class (philosophy) Artificial neural network Encoding (memory) Computer science Artificial intelligence Natural language processing