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Unsupervised Type and Token Identification of Idiomatic Expressions

Summary

Fazly, Cook and Stevenson study how to recognise idioms automatically without labelled data. They focus on verb+noun idiomatic combinations (VNICs), a common phrasal type built from a frequent verb and its direct-object noun (e.g., shoot the breeze, make a face). Drawing on linguistic work, they argue that idioms resist lexical substitution and syntactic variation, and that this resistance grows with idiomaticity. They turn these properties into statistical measures computed from real usage patterns in text. The measures are used in three tasks:

  • Type classification: separating potentially idiomatic VNICs from literal phrases that look similar.
  • Canonical forms: finding the preferred form of an idiom (shoot the breeze rather than shoot a breeze).
  • Token identification: deciding whether a single occurrence is idiomatic or literal.

The authors report that their type measures beat earlier state-of-the-art techniques. For tokens with frequent literal readings, their unsupervised methods outperform a majority baseline and come close to a supervised classifier. This matters for lexicon building, semantic parsing and machine translation.

Key points

  • An analysis of 60 idioms showed that nearly half also have a clear literal sense. For those, about 40% of occurrences are literal on average.
  • In the token data, 28 expressions (1,180 tokens) had roughly 40% literal usages, while 23 expressions (1,285 tokens) were almost entirely idiomatic.
  • There are two unsupervised token methods, CFORM and CONTEXT, which rely on type-level syntactic fixedness. They are compared against a supervised method, SUP, using Sens, PPV, Spec and NPV on the DT I high and DT I low sets.
  • On the predominantly idiomatic expressions, no method beat the very high majority baseline.
  • The paper appeared in Computational Linguistics (2009). It merges and extends an EACL 2006 paper and an ACL 2007 MWE workshop paper.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cited by

101 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 14 of them have a page here, 87 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/coli.08-010-r1-07-048

@article{fazly2009unsupervised,
  title = {{Unsupervised Type and Token Identification of Idiomatic Expressions}},
  author = {Fazly, Afsaneh and Cook, Paul and Stevenson, Suzanne},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.1162/coli.08-010-r1-07-048},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.08-010-r1-07-048}
}

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