Online resources, such as Wiktionary, provide an accurate but incomplete source of idiomatic phrases. In this paper, we study the problem of automatically identifying idiomatic dictionary entries with such resources. We train an idiom classifier on a newly gathered corpus of over 60,000 Wiktionary multi-word definitions, incorporating features that model whether phrase meanings are constructed ...

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...

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...

Twitter Idioms are one of the important types of hashtags that spread in Twitter. In this paper, we propose a classifier that can stratify the Idioms from the other kind of hashtags with 86.93% accuracy and high precision and recall rate. We then learn regression models on the stratified samples (Idioms and non-Idioms) separately to predict the popularity of the Idioms. This stratification not ...

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...

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...

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...