  This paper deals with the identification of Multiword Expressions (MWEs) in
Manipuri, a highly agglutinative Indian Language. Manipuri is listed in the
Eight Schedule of Indian Constitution. MWE plays an important role in the
applications of Natural Language Processing(NLP) like Machine Translation, Part
of Speech tagging, Information Retrieval, Question Answering etc. Feature
selection is an important factor in the recognition of Manipuri MWEs using
Conditional Random Field (CRF). The disadvantage of manual selection and
choosing of the appropriate features for running CRF motivates us to think of
Genetic Algorithm (GA). Using GA we are able to find the optimal features to
run the CRF. We have tried with fifty generations in feature selection along
with three fold cross validation as fitness function. This model demonstrated
the Recall (R) of 64.08%, Precision (P) of 86.84% and F-measure (F) of 73.74%,
showing an improvement over the CRF based Manipuri MWE identification without
GA application.
