Idiomatic Expressions in VerbaLex

Idiomatic expressions are part of everyday language, therefore NLP applications that can “understand” idioms are desirable. The nature of idioms is somewhat heterogenous — idioms form classes differing in many aspects (e.g. syntactic structure, lexical and syntactic fixedness). Although dictionaries of idioms exist, they usually do not contain information about fixedness or frequency since they are intended to be used by humans, not computer programs. In this work, we propose how to deal with idioms in the Czech verb valency lexicon VerbaLex using automatically extracted information from the largest dictionary Czech idioms and a web corpus. We propose a three stage process and discuss possible issues.