To Leave No Stone Unturned: Annotating Verbal Idioms in the Parallel Meaning Bank

Rafael Ehren, Kilian Evang, Laura Kallmeyer


Abstract
Idioms present many challenges to semantic annotation in a lexicalized framework, which leads to them being underrepresented or inadequately annotated in sembanks. In this work, we address this problem with respect to verbal idioms in the Parallel Meaning Bank (PMB), specifically in its German part, where only some idiomatic expressions have been annotated correctly. We first select candidate idiomatic expressions, then determine their idiomaticity status and whether they are decomposable or not, and then we annotate their semantics using WordNet senses and VerbNet semantic roles. Overall, inter-annotator agreement is very encouraging. A difficulty, however, is to choose the correct word sense. This is not surprising, given that English synsets are many and there is often no unique mapping from German idioms and words to them. Besides this, there are many subtle differences and interesting challenging cases. We discuss some of them in this paper.
Anthology ID:
2024.mwe-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Archna Bhatia, Gosse Bouma, A. Seza Doğruöz, Kilian Evang, Marcos Garcia, Voula Giouli, Lifeng Han, Joakim Nivre, Alexandre Rademaker
Venues:
MWE | UDW | WS
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGPARSE
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
115–124
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.mwe-1.16
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rafael Ehren, Kilian Evang, and Laura Kallmeyer. 2024. To Leave No Stone Unturned: Annotating Verbal Idioms in the Parallel Meaning Bank. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 115–124, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
To Leave No Stone Unturned: Annotating Verbal Idioms in the Parallel Meaning Bank (Ehren et al., MWE-UDW-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-2024-clasp/2024.mwe-1.16.pdf