Idiomatic expressions are used in everyday language and typically convey affect, i.e., emotion. However, very little work investigating the extent to which automated methods can recognise emotions expressed in idiom-containing text has been undertaken. This can be attributed to the lack of emotion-labelled datasets that support the development and evaluation of such methods. In this paper, we present the IDioms with EMotions (IDEM) dataset consisting of a total of 9685 idiom-containing sentences that were generated and labelled with any one of 36 emotion types, with the help of the GPT-4 generative language model. Human validation by two independent annotators showed that more than 51% of the generated sentences are ideal examples, with the annotators reaching an agreement rate of 62% measured in terms of Cohen’s Kappa coefficient. To establish baseline performance on IDEM, various transformer-based emotion recognition approaches were implemented and evaluated. Results show that a RoBERTa model fine-tuned as a sequence classifier obtains a weighted F1-score of 58.73%, when the sequence provided as input specifies the idiom contained in a given sentence, together with its definition. Since this input configuration is based on the assumption that the idiom contained in the given sentence is already known, we also sought to assess the feasibility of automatically identifying the idioms contained in IDEM sentences. To this end, a hybrid idiom identification approach combining a rule-based method and a deep learning-based model was developed, whose performance on IDEM was determined to be 84.99% in terms of F1-score.

Idiomatic expressions (or idioms) are phrases where the meaning of the phrase cannot be determined from the meaning of the individual words in the expression. Translating idioms between languages is therefore a challenging task. Transformer models based on contextual embeddings have advanced the state-of-the-art across many domains in the field of natural language processing. While research using transformers has advanced both idiom detection as well as idiom disambiguation, idiom translation has not seen a similar advancement. In this work, we investigate two approaches to fine-tuning a pretrained Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model to perform idiom translation from English to German. The first approach directly translates English idiom-containing sentences to German, while the second is underpinned by idiom paraphrasing, firstly paraphrasing English idiomatic expressions to their simplified English versions before translating them to German. Results of our evaluation show that each of the approaches is able to generate adequate translations.