@inproceedings{evang-etal-2025-proper,
    title = "The Proper Treatment of Verbal Idioms in {G}erman Discourse Representation Structure Parsing",
    author = "Evang, Kilian  and
      Ehren, Rafael  and
      Kallmeyer, Laura",
    editor = "Evang, Kilian  and
      Kallmeyer, Laura  and
      Pogodalla, Sylvain",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics",
    month = sep,
    year = "2025",
    address = {D{\"u}sseldorf, Germany},
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/2025.iwcs-1.16/",
    pages = "166--175",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-316-6",
    abstract = "Existing datasets for semantic parsing lack adequate representations of potentially idiomatic expressions (PIEs), i.e., expressions consisting of two or more lexemes that can occur with either a literal or an idiomatic reading. As a result, we cannot test semantic parsers for their ability to correctly distinguish between the two cases, and to assign appropriate meaning representations. We address this situation by combining two semantically annotated resources to obtain a corpus of German sentences containing literal and idiomatic occurrences of PIEs, paired with meaning representations whose concepts and roles reflect the respective literal or idiomatic meaning. Experiments with a state-of-the-art semantic parser show that given appropriate training data, it can learn to predict the idiomatic meanings and improve performance also for literal readings, even though predicting the correct concepts in context remains challenging. We provide additional insights through evaluation on synthetic data."
}