The goal of this research is to investigate whether we can take advantage of the syntactic and lexical fixedness of idiomatic expressions to devise corpus-based indices of idiomaticity and compositionality and whether these measures can actually predict human ratings of idiom syntactic flexibility. First of all we describe a method for automatically distinguishing potential idioms from only lit...

This paper presents the details of a pilot study in which we tagged portions of the American National Corpus (ANC) for idioms composed of verb-noun constructions, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. The three data sets we analyzed included 1,500-sentence samples from the spoken, the non-fiction, and the fiction portions of the ANC. This paper provides the details of the tagset we de...

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 violate cohesive ties in local contexts, while literal expressions do not. We propose two approaches: 1) Com...

Texts frequently contain expression whose meaning is not strictly literal, such as idioms. Idiomatic and non-literal expressions pose a major challenge to natural language processing technology as they often exhibit lexical and syntactic idiosyncrasies. We propose a novel unsupervised method for distinguishing literal and non-literal usages of expressions. Our method determines how well a liter...

Multiword expressions (MWEs) present particular and distinctive semantic properties, hence their automatic extraction receives special attention from the natural language processing (NLP) and corpus linguistics community, and is still an active research area. Unfortunately, the creation of necessary resources for this task is quite rigorous and many languages suffer from the lack of these; as i...

The paper discusses formulaic language, its classification, function, and role in Aeronautical English. On the one hand, using idiomatic expressions aviation communication may lead to ambiguity, confusion breakdown. other teaching student pilots air-traffic controllers can have positive effect on their fluency help them develop interactive communicative skills. Despite fact that research langua...

Native speakers of English use idioms such as put your foot down and spill the beans to label events that are not described literally by the words that compose the idioms. For many such expressions, the idiomatic meanings are transparent; that is, the connection between the literal expression and its figurative meaning makes sense to native speakers. We tested Keysar and Bly's (1995) hypothesis...

PURPOSE This study investigates the effects of left- and right-hemisphere damage (LHD and RHD) on the production of idiomatic or literal expressions utilizing acoustic analyses. METHOD Twenty-one native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and in a healthy control (HC) group produced 6 ditropically ambiguous (idiomatic or literal) sentences in 2 different speech tasks: elicitation and repetitio...

Abstract Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing their non-compositionality ability take on figurative or literal meaning depending the sentential context, they have been classical challenge for NLP systems. To address this challenge, we study task detecting whether sentence has idiomatic expression localizing it when occurs...