Idiom-Aware Compositional Distributed Semantics

Liu, Pengfei; Qian, Kaiyu; Qiu, Xipeng; Huang, Xuanjing

doi:10.18653/v1/d17-1124

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Liu et al [16] also explored the idea of lexical cohesion and word embeddings to learn to differentiate between literal and idiomatic meaning. Instead of comparing individual words from a PIE with its context, they compared the literal meaning of the PIE itself against the context.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leaving No Stone Unturned: Flexible Retrieval of Idiomatic Expressions from a Large Text Corpus

Hughes

Filimonov

Wray

et al. 2021

MAKE

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Idioms are multi-word expressions whose meaning cannot always be deduced from the literal meaning of constituent words. A key feature of idioms that is central to this paper is their peculiar mixture of fixedness and variability, which poses challenges for their retrieval from large corpora using traditional search approaches. These challenges hinder insights into idiom usage, affecting users who are conducting linguistic research as well as those involved in language education. To facilitate access to idiom examples taken from real-world contexts, we introduce an information retrieval system designed specifically for idioms. Given a search query that represents an idiom, typically in its canonical form, the system expands it automatically to account for the most common types of idiom variation including inflection, open slots, adjectival or adverbial modification and passivisation. As a by-product of query expansion, other types of idiom variation captured include derivation, compounding, negation, distribution across multiple clauses as well as other unforeseen types of variation. The system was implemented on top of Elasticsearch, an open-source, distributed, scalable, real-time search engine. Flexible retrieval of idioms is supported by a combination of linguistic pre-processing of the search queries, their translation into a set of query clauses written in a query language called Query DSL, and analysis, an indexing process that involves tokenisation and normalisation. Our system outperformed the phrase search in terms of recall and outperformed the keyword search in terms of precision. Out of the three, our approach was found to provide the best balance between precision and recall. By providing a fast and easy way of finding idioms in large corpora, our approach can facilitate further developments in fields such as linguistics, language education and natural language processing.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Leaving No Stone Unturned: Flexible Retrieval of Idiomatic Expressions from a Large Text Corpus

Hughes

Filimonov

Wray

et al. 2021

MAKE

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“…However, these methods introduced definitions but did not try to understand them. Liu et al (2017) used CharLSTM to encode the meaning of idioms, which has a similar idea to . Only a few works have been done with Chinese idioms such as building Chinese emotion lexicons (Xu et al, 2010) and improving Chinese word segmentation (Chan and Chong, 2008;Sun and Xu, 2011;Wang and Xu, 2017).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Correcting the Misuse: A Method for the Chinese Idiom Cloze Test

Wang¹,

Zhao²,

Yang³

et al. 2020

Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): The First Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning

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The cloze test for Chinese idioms is a new challenge in machine reading comprehension: given a sentence with a blank, choosing a candidate Chinese idiom which matches the context. Chinese idiom is a type of Chinese idiomatic expression. The common misuse of Chinese idioms leads to error in corpus and causes error in the learned semantic representation of Chinese idioms. In this paper, we introduce the definition written by Chinese experts to correct the misuse. We propose a model for the Chinese idiom cloze test integrating various information effectively. We propose an attention mechanism called Attribute Attention to balance the weight of different attributes among different descriptions of the Chinese idiom. Besides the given candidates of every blank, we also try to choose the answer from all Chinese idioms that appear in the dataset as the extra loss due to the uniqueness and specificity of Chinese idioms. In experiments, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art model.

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“…Finally, the fact that both directly extracted and composed idiom representations are possible fits well with the psycholinguistic observations in Titone and Conine (1999): Representations for full idiomatic expressions could be stored in addition to representations for their components; in processing, either or both might be accessed. Finally, Liu et al (2017) provide a specific illustration of how idiomatically interpreted expressions can be composed from distributed representations for non-idiomatic components; the option of composing an idiomatic expression from component parts offers the prospect of modeling not only some of the variants on idioms discussed in this paper but also variants such as pull wires for pull strings.…”

Section: Enriching Descriptive Content and Descriptive Content Composmentioning

confidence: 99%

Idioms and the syntax/semantics interface of descriptive content vs. reference

Gehrke

McNally

2019

Linguistics

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The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers.

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Idiom-Aware Compositional Distributed Semantics

Cited by 10 publications

References 29 publications

Leaving No Stone Unturned: Flexible Retrieval of Idiomatic Expressions from a Large Text Corpus

Leaving No Stone Unturned: Flexible Retrieval of Idiomatic Expressions from a Large Text Corpus

Correcting the Misuse: A Method for the Chinese Idiom Cloze Test

Idioms and the syntax/semantics interface of descriptive content vs. reference

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