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...

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...

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...

Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., sales hit the roof vs. hit the roof of the car. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that ...

Prediction is pervasive in human cognition and plays a central role in language comprehension. At an electrophysiological level, this cognitive function contributes substantially in determining the amplitude of the N400. In fact, the amplitude of the N400 to words within a sentence has been shown to depend on how predictable those words are: The more predictable a word, the smaller the N400 eli...

Modern processors support hardware-assist instructions (such as TRT and TROT instructions on IBM zSeries) to accelerate certain functions such as delimiter search and character conversion. Such special instructions have often been used in high performance libraries, but they have not been exploited well in optimizing compilers except for some limited cases. We propose a new idiom recognition te...

Expressions, such as add fuel to the fire, can be interpreted literally or idiomatically depending on the context they occur in. Many Natural Language Processing applications could improve their performance if idiom recognition were improved. Our approach is based on the idea that idioms and their literal counterparts do not appear in the same contexts. We propose two approaches: (1) Compute in...

Using eye-tracking, we investigate on-line processing of idioms in a biasing story context by native and non-native speakers of English. The stimuli are idioms used figuratively (at the end of the day – ‘eventually’), literally (at the end of the day – ‘in the evening’), and novel phrases (at the end of the war). Native speaker results indicate a processing advantage for idioms over novel phras...

We describe several experiments whose goal is to automatically identify idiomatic expressions in written text. We explore two approaches for the task: 1) idiom recognition as outlier detection; and 2) supervised classification of sentences. We apply principal component analysis for outlier detection. Detecting idioms as lexical outliers does not exploit class label information. So, in the follo...