This study aimed to investigate how Iranian EFL learners performed in producing sentences containing idioms and whether they had any problems in producing such sentences. This query, subsequently, raised the question of whether idioms influenced the participants’ grammaticality judgment on idiom-containing sentences. For this purpose, firstly, the writings of 24 learners were investigated for a...

Detecting idioms in a sentence is important to sentence understanding. This paper discusses the linguistic knowledge for idiom detection. The challenges are that idioms can be ambiguous between literal and idiomatic meanings, and that they can be “transformed” when expressed in a sentence. However, there has been little research on Japanese idiom detection with its ambiguity and transformations...

To investigate whether idiom production was vulnerable to age-related difficulties, we asked 40 younger (ages 18-30) and 40 older healthy adults (ages 60-85) to produce idiomatic expressions in a story-completion task. Younger adults produced significantly more correct idiom responses (73%) than did older adults (60%). When older adults generated partially correct responses, they were less like...

Recognizing idioms in a sentence is important to sentence understanding. This paper discusses the lexical knowledge of idioms for idiom recognition. The challenges are that idioms can be ambiguous between literal and idiomatic meanings, and that they can be “transformed” when expressed in a sentence. However, there has been little research on Japanese idiom recognition with its ambiguity and tr...

Verbal idioms constitute a challenge for machine translation systems: their meaning is not compositional, preventing a wordfor-word translation, and they can be discontinuous, preventing a match during tokenization. This paper presents the treatment of verbal idioms in our machine translation system, which addresses both challenges by deferring idiom matching until after the parse, and by allow...

Hashimoto, Chikara and Kawahara, Daisuke. 2008. Drawing a Line between Literal and Idiomatic Meanings Based on Supervised WSD. Linguistic Research 25(2), 105-123. Some phrases can be interpreted either idiomatically (figuratively) or literally in context, and the precise identification of idioms is indispensable for full-fledged natural language processing (NLP). To this end, we have constructe...

Some phrases can be interpreted either idiomatically (figuratively) or literally in context, and the precise identification of idioms is indispensable for full-fledged natural language processing (NLP). To this end, we have constructed an idiom corpus for Japanese. This paper reports on the corpus and the results of an idiom identification experiment using the corpus. The corpus targets 146 amb...

Translating idioms is one of the most diicult tasks for human translators and translation machines alike. The main problems consist in recognizing an idiom and in distinguishing idiomatic from non-idiomatic usage. Recognition is diicult since many idioms can be modiied and others can be discontinuously spread over a clause. But with the help of systematic idiom collections and special rules the...