Potentially idiomatic expressions (PIEs) carry meanings inherently tied to the everyday experience of a given language community. As such, they constitute an interesting challenge for assessing the linguistic (and to some extent cultural) capabilities of NLP systems. In this paper, we present XMPIE, a parallel multilingual and multimodal dataset of potentially idiomatic expressions. The dataset, containing 34 languages and over ten thousand items, allows comparative analyses of idiomatic patterns among language-specific realisations and preferences in order to gather insights about shared cultural aspects. This parallel dataset allows evaluation of language model performance for a given PIE in different languages and whether idiomatic understanding in one language can be transferred to another. Moreover, the dataset supports the study of PIEs across textual and visual modalities, to measure to what extent PIE understanding in one modality transfers or implies in understanding in another modality (text vs. image). The data was created by language experts, with both textual and visual components crafted under multilingual guidelines, and each PIE is accompanied by five images representing a spectrum from idiomatic to literal meanings, including semantically related and random distractors. The result is a high-quality benchmark for evaluating multilingual and multimodal idiomatic language understanding.

We present edition 2.0 of the PARSEME multilingual corpus annotated for multiword expressions (MWEs), resulting from efforts of the PARSEME community towards universality-driven modeling of idiomaticity. With respect to previous editions, we extend the annotation scope to all syntactic MWE categories: verbal, nominal, adjectival, adverbial and functional. We cover 17 languages, of which 7 are new. The annotation process is based on cross-lingually unified guidelines, phrased as decision diagrams over linguistic tests, and a typology of 18 MWE categories. The corpus contains almost 5 million tokens, over 250,000 sentences and 140,000 MWE annotations. The applicability of the corpus is tested in baseline experiments with a prompt-based MWE identification system. Results show that generic large language models do not encode sufficient knowledge to solve the MWE identification task.

Informal language is a style of spoken or written language frequently used in casual conversations, social media, weblogs, emails and text messages. In informal writing, the language undergoes some lexical and/or syntactic changes varying among different languages. Persian is one of the languages with many differences between its formal and informal styles of writing, thus developing informal language processing tools for this language seems necessary. In the present paper, the methodology in building a parallel corpus of 50,000 sentence pairs with alignments in the word/phrase level is described. The resulting corpus has about 530,000 alignments and a dictionary containing 49,397 word and phrase pairs. The observed differences between formal and informal writing are explained in detail.