Confirming the Non-compositionality of Idioms for Sentiment Analysis

Alyssa Hwang, Christopher Hidey


Abstract
An idiom is defined as a non-compositional multiword expression, one whose meaning cannot be deduced from the definitions of the component words. This definition does not explicitly define the compositionality of an idiom’s sentiment; this paper aims to determine whether the sentiment of the component words of an idiom is related to the sentiment of that idiom. We use the Dictionary of Affect in Language augmented by WordNet to give each idiom in the Sentiment Lexicon of IDiomatic Expressions (SLIDE) a component-wise sentiment score and compare it to the phrase-level sentiment label crowdsourced by the creators of SLIDE. We find that there is no discernible relation between these two measures of idiom sentiment. This supports the hypothesis that idioms are not compositional for sentiment along with semantics and motivates further work in handling idioms for sentiment analysis.
Anthology ID:
W19-5114
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019)
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Agata Savary, Carla Parra Escartín, Francis Bond, Jelena Mitrović, Verginica Barbu Mititelu
Venue:
MWE
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
125–129
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5114
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5114
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alyssa Hwang and Christopher Hidey. 2019. Confirming the Non-compositionality of Idioms for Sentiment Analysis. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and WordNet (MWE-WN 2019), pages 125–129, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Confirming the Non-compositionality of Idioms for Sentiment Analysis (Hwang & Hidey, MWE 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/W19-5114.pdf