In this paper, methods for identification and delimitation of idiomatic expressions in large Web corpora are presented. The proposed methods are based on the observation that idiomatic expressions are sometimes accompanied by metalinguistic expressions, e.g. the word “proverbial”, the expression “as they say” or quotation marks. Even though the frequency of such idiom-related metalinguistic mar...

Idioms pose a great challenge to natural language understanding. A system that can automatically paraphrase idioms in context has applications in many NLP tasks. This paper proposes a phrasal substitution method to replace idioms with their figurative meanings in literal English. Our approach identifies relevant replacement phrases from an idiom’s dictionary definition and performs appropriate ...

Abstract Idiomatic expressions (IEs), characterized by their non-compositionality, are an important part of natural language. They have been a classical challenge to NLP, including pre-trained language models that drive today’s state-of-the-art. Prior work has identified deficiencies in contextualized representation stemming from the underlying compositional paradigm representation. In this wor...

Idiomatic expressions such as kick the bucket or go down a storm can differ on a number of internal features, such as familiarity, meaning, literality, and decomposability, and these types of features have been the focus of a number of normative studies. In this article, we provide normative data for a set of Bulgarian idioms and their English translations, and by doing so replicate in a Slavic...

Idiomatic utterances contribute by virtue of their aspectual class to the temporal structure of discourse – hence it is essential that theories of aspect derivation and discourse structure should encompass them. A recent claim has been made (McGinnis 2002) that the aspectual class of idiomatic expressions can be derived compositionally, by the same process as in literal language. We examine thi...

This paper reports on a research carried out at the Institute for Computational Linguistics (ILC) on a set of idiomatic nautical expressions in Italian and English. A total of 200 Italian expressions were first selected and examined, using both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, as well as specific lexicographical works dealing with the subject of idiomaticity, especially of the maritime t...

The goal of this paper is to present a procedure for the automatic retrieval of idiomatic expressions from large text corpora. The procedure combines text segmentation techniques and Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer, Foltz, Laham, 1998). Three indices were computed on the basis of the three-fold hypothesis that a) idiomatic expressions should have few neighbours, that b) idiomatic expressions...