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Michaela Socolof

Alumni

Publications

Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency
Michaela Socolof
Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Michael Wagner
Timothy J. O'Donnell
Idioms are unlike most phrases in two important ways. First, the words in an idiom have non-canonical meanings. Second, the non-canonical me… (see more)anings of words in an idiom are contingent on the presence of other words in the idiom. Linguistic theories differ on whether these properties depend on one another, as well as whether special theoretical machinery is needed to accommodate idioms. We define two measures that correspond to the properties above, and we implement them using BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and XLNet(Yang et al., 2019). We show that idioms fall at the expected intersection of the two dimensions, but that the dimensions themselves are not correlated. Our results suggest that special machinery to handle idioms may not be warranted.
2022-04-30
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org