Kai Golan Hashiloni
2025
Easy as PIE? Identifying Multi-Word Expressions with LLMs
Kai Golan Hashiloni
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Ofri Hefetz
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Kfir Bar
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We investigate the identification of idiomatic expressions—a semantically non-compositional subclass of multiword expressions (MWEs)—in running text using large language models (LLMs) without any fine-tuning. Instead, we adopt a prompt-based approach and evaluate a range of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought variants, across multiple languages, datasets, and model types. Our experiments show that, with well-crafted prompts, LLMs can perform competitively with supervised models trained on annotated data. These findings highlight the potential of prompt-based LLMs as a flexible and effective alternative for idiomatic expression identification.