Abstract
This paper presents an exploratory study on large-scale detection of idiomatic expressions in essays written by non-native speakers of English. We describe a computational search procedure for automatic detection of idiom-candidate phrases in essay texts. The study used a corpus of essays written during a standardized examination of English language proficiency. Automatically-flagged candidate expressions were manually annotated for idiomaticity. The study found that idioms are widely used in EFL essays. The study also showed that a search algorithm that accommodates the syntactic and lexical exibility of idioms can increase the recall of idiom instances by 30%, but it also increases the amount of false positives.- Anthology ID:
- W18-0905
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- New Orleans, Louisiana
- Editors:
- Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Chee Wee
- Venue:
- Fig-Lang
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 34–44
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W18-0905
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/W18-0905
- Cite (ACL):
- Michael Flor and Beata Beigman Klebanov. 2018. Catching Idiomatic Expressions in EFL Essays. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, pages 34–44, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Catching Idiomatic Expressions in EFL Essays (Flor & Beigman Klebanov, Fig-Lang 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/W18-0905.pdf