Programs written in scripting languages employ idioms that confound conventional type systems. In this paper, we highlight one important set of related idioms: the use of local control and state to reason informally about types. To address these idioms, we formalize run-time tags and their relationship to types, and use these to present a novel strategy to integrate typing with flow analysis in...

The present study examined the role of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in processing alternative meanings of idiomatic sentences. We conducted two experiments using ambiguous idioms with plausible literal interpretations as stimuli. In the first experiment we tested hemispheric differences in accessing either the literal or the idiomatic meaning of idioms for targets presented...

We describe a language understanding model in which idioms, like other units of linguistic knowledge, are treated as constructions linking elements of form with elements of meaning. They may also, however, invoke additional metaphorical mappings that can actively constrain both the interpretation and acceptability of idiomatic expressions. A wide variety of idiomatic phenomena, including compos...

This paper discusses the t reatment of fixed word expressions developed for our ITS-2 FrenchEnglish translation system. This t reatment makes a clear distinction between compounds i.e. mult iword expressions of X°-level in which the chunks are adjacent and idiomatic phrases i.e. mult iword expressions of phrasal categories, where the chunks are not necessarily adjacent. In our system, compounds...

We revisit the connection between three notions of computation: Moggi’s monads, Hughes’s arrows and McBride and Paterson’s idioms (also called applicative functors). We show that idioms are equivalent to arrows that satisfy the type isomorphism A;B ' 1 ; (A→ B) and that monads are equivalent to arrows that satisfy the type isomorphism A; B ' A → (1 ; B). Further, idioms embed into arrows and ar...

This paper describes an experiment to evaluate the impact of idioms on Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) process using the language pair English/BrazilianPortuguese. Our results show that on sentences containing idioms a standard SMT system achieves about half the BLEU score of the same system when applied to sentences that do not contain idioms. We also provide a short error analysis and o...

This squib discusses metalinguistic modification, expressives, domain modification, hypallage, and conjunctive modification within verb phrase idioms. The examples presented here show that non-combining idioms, to use terminology based on that of Nunberg, Sag & Wasow 1994, allow for modifiers on their internal constituents, but only in certain circumstances. This observation is shown to be deri...

This paper presents a possible architecture for a multilingual database of idioms. We discuss the challenges that idioms present to the creation of such a database and propose a possible encoding that maximises the amount of information that can be stored for different languages. Such a resource provides important information for linguistic, computational linguistic and psycholinguistic use, an...

Is Chinese translation of English Idioms possible? This has been a topic of debate for a very long period of time. Many linguists and translators have dwelt on this problem in their books or articles. Some of the popular ideas about the problems of translatability of English Idioms will be introduced in this paper which aims at helping people know more about the translatability of English Idioms.