The task of multi-word expressions identification and processing has posed a remarkable challenge to the natural language processing applications. One related subtask in this arena is correct labelling of the sentences with the presence of idiomatic expressions as either literal or idiomatic sense. The regional Indian language Konkani spoken in the states located in the west coast of India lacks in the research in idiom processing tasks. We aim at bridging this gap through a contribution to idiom identification method in Konkani language. This paper classifies the idiomatic expression usage in Konkani language as idiomatic or literal usage using a neural network-based setup. The developed system was able to successfully perform the identification task with an accuracy of 79.5 % and F1-score of 0.77.

Konkani is a language spoken by a large number of people from the states located in the west coast of India. It is the official language of Goa state from the Indian subcontinent. Currently there is a lack of idioms corpus in the low-resource Konkani language. This paper aims to improve the progress in idiomatic sentence identification in order to enhance linguistic processing by creating the first corpus for idioms in the Konkani language. We select a unique list of 1597 idioms from multiple sources and proceed with a strictly controlled sentence creation procedure through crowdsourcing. This is followed by quality check of the sentences and annotation procedure by the experts in the Konkani language. We were able to build a good quality corpus comprising of 6520 sentences written in the Devanagari script of Konkani language. Analysis of the collected idioms and their usage in the created sentences revealed the dominance of selective domains like ‘human body’ in the creation and occurrences of idiomatic expressions in the Konkani language. This corpus is made publicly available.