AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models

Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Edward Gow-Smith, Carolina Scarton, Aline Villavicencio


Abstract
Despite their success in a variety of NLP tasks, pre-trained language models, due to their heavy reliance on compositionality, fail in effectively capturing the meanings of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially idioms. Therefore, datasets and methods to improve the representation of MWEs are urgently needed. Existing datasets are limited to providing the degree of idiomaticity of expressions along with the literal and, where applicable, (a single) non-literal interpretation of MWEs. This work presents a novel dataset of naturally occurring sentences containing MWEs manually classified into a fine-grained set of meanings, spanning both English and Portuguese. We use this dataset in two tasks designed to test i) a language model’s ability to detect idiom usage, and ii) the effectiveness of a language model in generating representations of sentences containing idioms. Our experiments demonstrate that, on the task of detecting idiomatic usage, these models perform reasonably well in the one-shot and few-shot scenarios, but that there is significant scope for improvement in the zero-shot scenario. On the task of representing idiomaticity, we find that pre-training is not always effective, while fine-tuning could provide a sample efficient method of learning representations of sentences containing MWEs.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.294
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3464–3477
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.294
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.294
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Edward Gow-Smith, Carolina Scarton, and Aline Villavicencio. 2021. AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3464–3477, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models (Tayyar Madabushi et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.294.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.294.mp4
Code
 h-tayyarmadabushi/astitchinlanguagemodels
Data
AStitchInLanguageModels