Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-Paced Reading and Language Models
Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Marco S. G. Senaldi, Philippe Blache, Alessandro Lenci
Abstract
An open question in language comprehension studies is whether non-compositional multiword expressions like idioms and compositional-but-frequent word sequences are processed differently. Are the latter constructed online, or are instead directly retrieved from the lexicon, with a degree of entrenchment depending on their frequency? In this paper, we address this question with two different methodologies. First, we set up a self-paced reading experiment comparing human reading times for idioms and both highfrequency and low-frequency compositional word sequences. Then, we ran the same experiment using the Surprisal metrics computed with Neural Language Models (NLMs). Our results provide evidence that idiomatic and high-frequency compositional expressions are processed similarly by both humans and NLMs. Additional experiments were run to test the possible factors that could affect the NLMs’ performance.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.mwe-1.13
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2023)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Editors:
- Archna Bhatia, Kilian Evang, Marcos Garcia, Voula Giouli, Lifeng Han, Shiva Taslimipoor
- Venue:
- MWE
- SIG:
- SIGLEX
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 87–98
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.mwe-1.13
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.mwe-1.13
- Cite (ACL):
- Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Marco S. G. Senaldi, Philippe Blache, and Alessandro Lenci. 2023. Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-Paced Reading and Language Models. In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Multiword Expressions (MWE 2023), pages 87–98, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-Paced Reading and Language Models (Rambelli et al., MWE 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2024-07/2023.mwe-1.13.pdf