Linguistic Cues for Distinguishing Literal and Non-Literal Usages

We investigate the effectiveness of different linguistic cues for distinguishing literal and non-literal usages of potentially idiomatic expressions. We focus specifically on features that generalize across different target expressions. While idioms on the whole are frequent, instances of each particular expression can be relatively infrequent and it will often not be feasible to extract and annotate a sufficient number of examples for each expression one might want to disambiguate. We experimented with a number of different features and found that features encoding lexical cohesion as well as some syntactic features can generalize well across idioms.