MAGPIE: A Large Corpus of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions

Hessel Haagsma, Johan Bos, Malvina Nissim


Abstract
Given the limited size of existing idiom corpora, we aim to enable progress in automatic idiom processing and linguistic analysis by creating the largest-to-date corpus of idioms for English. Using a fixed idiom list, automatic pre-extraction, and a strictly controlled crowdsourced annotation procedure, we show that it is feasible to build a high-quality corpus comprising more than 50K instances, an order of a magnitude larger than previous resources. Crucial ingredients of crowdsourcing were the selection of crowdworkers, clear and comprehensive instructions, and an interface that breaks down the task in small, manageable steps. Analysis of the resulting corpus revealed strong effects of genre on idiom distribution, providing new evidence for existing theories on what influences idiom usage. The corpus also contains rich metadata, and is made publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
279–287
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.35
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hessel Haagsma, Johan Bos, and Malvina Nissim. 2020. MAGPIE: A Large Corpus of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 279–287, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
MAGPIE: A Large Corpus of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions (Haagsma et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.35.pdf