@inproceedings{de-souza-etal-2025-memory,
    title = "What does memory retrieval leave on the table? Modelling the Cost of Semi-Compositionality with {MINERVA}2 and s{BERT}",
    author = "De Souza, Sydelle  and
      Vegner, Ivan  and
      Mollica, Francis  and
      Doumas, Leonidas A. A.",
    editor = "Boleda, Gemma  and
      Roth, Michael",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 29th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.conll-1.19/",
    pages = "291--311",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-271-8",
    abstract = "Despite being ubiquitous in natural language, collocations (e.g., kick+habit) incur a unique processing cost, compared to compositional phrases (kick+door) and idioms (kick+bucket). We confirm this cost with behavioural data as well as MINERVA2, a memory model, suggesting that collocations constitute a distinct linguistic category. While the model fails to fully capture the observed human processing patterns, we find that below a specific item frequency threshold, the model{'}s retrieval failures align with human reaction times across conditions. This suggests an alternative processing mechanism that activates when memory retrieval fails."
}