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 constructed an idiom corpus for Japanese. This paper reports on the corpus and the results of an idiom identification experiment using the corpus. The corpus targets 146 amb...

Translating idioms is one of the most diicult tasks for human translators and translation machines alike. The main problems consist in recognizing an idiom and in distinguishing idiomatic from non-idiomatic usage. Recognition is diicult since many idioms can be modiied and others can be discontinuously spread over a clause. But with the help of systematic idiom collections and special rules the...

The purpose of this study was to learn how transparency and ambiguity affect idiom learning. To start, 157 French idioms were translated to English and normed for familiarity, transparency, and ambiguity. Experiment 1 was a training study in which 32 of these idioms were taught to 25 native English speakers over two days of training. A cued recall test during a third session showed a reliable e...

Translating idioms is one of the most difficult tasks for human translators and translation machines alike. The main problems consist in recognizing an idiom and in distinguishing idiomatic from non-idiomatic usage. Recognition is difficult since many idioms can be modified and others can be discontinuously spread over a clause. But with the help of systematic idiom collections and special rule...

1 Running head: Idiom understanding and reading difficulties To get hold of the wrong end of the stick: reasons for poor idiom understanding in children with reading comprehension difficulties.

This paper presents the details of a pilot study in which we tagged portions of the American National Corpus (ANC) for idioms composed of verb-noun constructions, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. The three data sets we analyzed included 1,500-sentence samples from the spoken, the non-fiction, and the fiction portions of the ANC. This paper provides the details of the tagset we de...

this study aimed to investigate how iranian efl learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. this query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. for this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a...

Abstract Idioms are a kind of idiomatic expression in Chinese, most which consist four Chinese characters. Due to the properties non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning, idioms hard be understood by children non-native speakers. This study proposes novel task, denoted as Idiom Paraphrasing (CIP). CIP aims rephrase idiom-containing sentences non-idiomatic ones under premise preserving orig...

Idiom token classification is the task of deciding for a set of potentially idiomatic phrases whether each occurrence of a phrase is a literal or idiomatic usage of the phrase. In this work we explore the use of Skip-Thought Vectors to create distributed representations that encode features that are predictive with respect to idiom token classification. We show that classifiers using these repr...

Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms. After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and their production late...