Idiomatic Object Usage and Support Verbs

Every language contains complex expressions that are language-specific. The general problem when trying to build au tomated translation systems or human-readable dictionaries is to detect expressions that can be used idiomatically and then whether the expressions can be used idiomatically in a particular text, or whether a literal t ranslat ion would be preferred. It follows from the definition of idiomatic expression that when a complex expression is used idiomatically, it contains at least one element which is semantically "out of context". In this paper, we discuss a method that finds idiomatic collocations in a text corpus. The method detects semantic a symmet ry by taking advantage of differences in syntactic distributions. We demonstra te the method using a specific linguistic phenomenon, verb-object collocations. The asymmet ry between a verb and its object is the focus in our work, and it makes the approach different from the methods that use e.g. mutua l information, which is a symmetric