Literal or idiomatic? Identifying the reading of single occurrences of German multiword expressions using word embeddings

Rafael Ehren


Abstract
Non-compositional multiword expressions (MWEs) still pose serious issues for a variety of natural language processing tasks and their ubiquity makes it impossible to get around methods which automatically identify these kind of MWEs. The method presented in this paper was inspired by Sporleder and Li (2009) and is able to discriminate between the literal and non-literal use of an MWE in an unsupervised way. It is based on the assumption that words in a text form cohesive units. If the cohesion of these units is weakened by an expression, it is classified as literal, and otherwise as idiomatic. While Sporleder an Li used Normalized Google Distance to modell semantic similarity, the present work examines the use of a variety of different word embeddings.
Anthology ID:
E17-4011
Volume:
Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
103–112
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-4011
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rafael Ehren. 2017. Literal or idiomatic? Identifying the reading of single occurrences of German multiword expressions using word embeddings. In Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 103–112, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Literal or idiomatic? Identifying the reading of single occurrences of German multiword expressions using word embeddings (Ehren, EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/E17-4011.pdf