Detecting idioms in a sentence is important to sentence understanding. This paper discusses the linguistic knowledge for idiom detection. 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 detection with its ambiguity and transformations...

We propose an unsupervised method for distinguishing literal and non-literal usages of idiomatic expressions. Our method determines how well a literal interpretation is linked to the overall cohesive structure of the discourse. If strong links can be found, the expression is classified as literal, otherwise as idiomatic. We show that this method can help to tell apart literal and non-literal us...

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less like...

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 tr...

Verbal idioms constitute a challenge for machine translation systems: their meaning is not compositional, preventing a wordfor-word translation, and they can be discontinuous, preventing a match during tokenization. This paper presents the treatment of verbal idioms in our machine translation system, which addresses both challenges by deferring idiom matching until after the parse, and by allow...

Hashimoto, Chikara and Kawahara, Daisuke. 2008. Drawing a Line between Literal and Idiomatic Meanings Based on Supervised WSD. Linguistic Research 25(2), 105-123. Some phrases can be interpreted either idiomatically (figuratively) or literally in context, and the precise identification of idioms is indispensable for full-fledged natural language processing (NLP). To this end, we have constructe...

Corpus surveys have shown that the exact forms with which idioms are realized are subject to variation. We report a rating experiment showing that such alternative realizations have varying degrees of acceptability. Idiom variation challenges processing theories associating idioms with fixed multi-word form units (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), fixed configurations of words (Cacciari & Tabossi, 1988), o...