When a Red Herring in Not a Red Herring: Using Compositional Methods to Detect Non-Compositional Phrases

Non-compositional phrases such as red herring and weakly compositional phrases such as spelling bee are an integral part of natural language (Sag et al., 2002). They are also the phrases that are difficult, or even impossible, for good compositional distributional models of semantics. Compositionality detection therefore provides a good testbed for compositional methods. We compare an integrated compositional distributional approach, using sparse high dimensional representations, with the adhoc compositional approach of applying simple composition operations to state-ofthe-art neural embeddings.