However, such statistics are typically gathered on a case-by-case basis, and no reliable procedure exists to automatically identify constructions.
in computational linguistics, many automatic procedures are studied for identifying MWEs (Sag et al., 2002) -with varying success -but here they are treated as exceptions: identifying multi-word expressions is a pre-processing step, where typically adjacent words are grouped together after which the usual procedures for syntactic or semantic analysis can be applied.