The Other Side of the Coin: Unsupervised Disambiguation of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions by Contrasting Senses

Hessel Haagsma, Malvina Nissim, Johan Bos


Abstract
Disambiguation of potentially idiomatic expressions involves determining the sense of a potentially idiomatic expression in a given context, e.g. determining that make hay in ‘Investment banks made hay while takeovers shone.’ is used in a figurative sense. This enables automatic interpretation of idiomatic expressions, which is important for applications like machine translation and sentiment analysis. In this work, we present an unsupervised approach for English that makes use of literalisations of idiom senses to improve disambiguation, which is based on the lexical cohesion graph-based method by Sporleder and Li (2009). Experimental results show that, while literalisation carries novel information, its performance falls short of that of state-of-the-art unsupervised methods.
Anthology ID:
W18-4919
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018)
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Agata Savary, Carlos Ramisch, Jena D. Hwang, Nathan Schneider, Melanie Andresen, Sameer Pradhan, Miriam R. L. Petruck
Venues:
LAW | MWE
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
178–184
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4919/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hessel Haagsma, Malvina Nissim, and Johan Bos. 2018. The Other Side of the Coin: Unsupervised Disambiguation of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions by Contrasting Senses. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Linguistic Annotation, Multiword Expressions and Constructions (LAW-MWE-CxG-2018), pages 178–184, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Other Side of the Coin: Unsupervised Disambiguation of Potentially Idiomatic Expressions by Contrasting Senses (Haagsma et al., LAW-MWE 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4919.pdf