Leveraging distributed representations and lexico-syntactic fixedness for token-level prediction of the idiomaticity of English verb-noun combinations

Milton King, Paul Cook


Abstract
Verb-noun combinations (VNCs) - e.g., blow the whistle, hit the roof, and see stars - are a common type of English idiom that are ambiguous with literal usages. In this paper we propose and evaluate models for classifying VNC usages as idiomatic or literal, based on a variety of approaches to forming distributed representations. Our results show that a model based on averaging word embeddings performs on par with, or better than, a previously-proposed approach based on skip-thoughts. Idiomatic usages of VNCs are known to exhibit lexico-syntactic fixedness. We further incorporate this information into our models, demonstrating that this rich linguistic knowledge is complementary to the information carried by distributed representations.
Anthology ID:
P18-2055
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
345–350
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-2055
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-2055
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milton King and Paul Cook. 2018. Leveraging distributed representations and lexico-syntactic fixedness for token-level prediction of the idiomaticity of English verb-noun combinations. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 345–350, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging distributed representations and lexico-syntactic fixedness for token-level prediction of the idiomaticity of English verb-noun combinations (King & Cook, ACL 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-2055.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-2055.Presentation.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/P18-2055.mp4