Experiments in Idiom Recognition

Jing Peng, Anna Feldman


Abstract
Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., ‘sales hit the roof’ vs. ‘hit the roof of the car’. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that the distributions of the contexts of the idiomatic phrases will be different from the contexts of the literal usages. We measure contexts by using projections of the words into vector space. For comparison, we implement Fazly et al. (2009)’s, Sporleder and Li (2009)’s, and Li and Sporleder (2010b)’s methods and apply them to our data. We provide experimental results validating the proposed techniques.
Anthology ID:
C16-1259
Volume:
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
2752–2761
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1259
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jing Peng and Anna Feldman. 2016. Experiments in Idiom Recognition. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 2752–2761, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Experiments in Idiom Recognition (Peng & Feldman, COLING 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C16-1259.pdf