Japanese Idiom Recognition: Drawing a Line between Literal and Idiomatic Meanings

Recognizing idioms in a sentence is important to sentence understanding. This paper discusses the lexical knowledge of idioms for idiom recognition. The challenges are that idioms can be ambiguous between literal and idiomatic meanings, and that they can be “transformed” when expressed in a sentence. However, there has been little research on Japanese idiom recognition with its ambiguity and transformations taken into account. We propose a set of lexical knowledge for idiom recognition. We evaluated the knowledge by measuring the performance of an idiom recognizer that exploits the knowledge. As a result, more than 90% of the idioms in a corpus are recognized with 90% accuracy.