Idiomatic expressions can be interpreted literally or figuratively. These two meanings are often processed in parallel or very rapidly, as evidenced by online measures of idiomatic processing. Because in many cases the figurative meaning cannot be derived from the component lexical elements and because of the speed with which this meaning is accessed, it is assumed such meanings are stored in s...

In our work we address limitations in the state-of-the-art in idiom type identification. We investigate different approaches for a lexical fixedness metric, a component of the state-of-the-art model. We also show that our Machine Learning based approach to the idiom type identification task achieves an F1-score of 0.85, an improvement of 11 points over the state-of-the-art.

Strategic programming is an idiom for generic programming where the concept of a strategy plays a central role. A strategy is a generic, dataprocessing action. Strategies are first-class citizens as witnessed by a combinator style. Two important characteristics of strategies are that they can traverse into compound data, and that they can be customized by type-specific actions. We provide a gen...

This paper describes a project aimed at converting a legacy representation of English idioms into an XML-based format. The project is set in the context of a large electronic English-Polish dictionary which contains several hundred formalized idiom descriptions and which has been released under the terms of a free license. In short, the project consists of three phases: cleaning up the dictiona...

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...

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 ...

Within the stratified harmonic behavior known as melodic-harmonic divorce, this paper identifies a gesture repeated idiomatically across rock repertory. Dubbed “sub-circle” motion, idiom is specifically form of syntax divorce wherein melodic layer unfolds in way consonant with and suggestive circle-of-fifths root motion (+P4) between two accompanying major chords; however, layer...