Literal readings of multiword expressions: as scarce as hen’s teeth

Multiword expressions can have both idiomatic and literal occurrences. Distinguishing these two cases is considered one of the major challenges in MWE processing. We suggest that literal readings should be considered in both semantic and syntactic terms, which motivates their study in a treebank. We propose heuristics to automatically pre-identify candidate sentences that might contain literal readings of verbal VMWEs, and we apply them to an existing Polish treebank. We also perform a linguistic study of the literal readings extracted by the different heuristics. The results suggest that literal readings constitute a rare phenomenon. We also identify some properties that may distinguish them from their idiomatic counterparts.