Literal Occurrences of Multiword Expressions: Rare Birds That Cause a Stir

Abstract

Multiword expressions can have both idiomatic and literal occurrences. For instance pulling strings can be understood either as making use of one’s influence, or literally. Distinguishing these two cases has been addressed in linguistics and psycholinguistics studies, and is also considered one of the major challenges in MWE processing. We suggest that literal occurrences should be considered in both semantic and syntactic terms, which motivates their study in a treebank. We propose heuristics to automatically pre-identify candidate sentences that might contain literal occurrences of verbal VMWEs, and we apply them to existing treebanks in five typologically different languages: Basque, German, Greek, Polish and Portuguese. We also perform a linguistic study of the literal occurrences extracted by the different heuristics. The results suggest that literal occurrences constitute a rare phenomenon. We also identify some properties that may distinguish them from their idiomatic counterparts. This article is a largely extended version of Savary and Cordeiro (2018).

Learning about phraseology from corpora: A linguistically motivated approach for Multiword Expression identification

“…It is worth mentioning that a high amount of the erroneously classified candidates were not MWEs but candidates resulting from coincidental occurrences of the lemmas in a given MWE (for a better definition of coincidental occurrences, see [6]). This is the case of example (16b), which is a non-MWE candidate of the VNMWE in (16a), created as a consequence of the divisions made during Step 1.…”

“…On the other hand, opposite strategies where only the lemmas of the component words are searched for (within a given word distance) are not effective either, since these are, in their turn, too wide. These strategies would identify all of the occurrences in examples (4) and (5a)-(5b), but also the following ones and many others alike, which would be false positives: (6). They will make progress and will soon come to a conclusion.…”

“…The main assumption behind the work explained here is that MWE-specific morphosyntactic information is helpful for MWE processing in general and MWE identification in particular. As a matter of fact, recent studies [6] have shown that very few word combinations occur in corpora both literally and idiomatically with the very same morphosyntactic features, suggesting that most ambiguities concerning MWEs can be solved by looking at morphology and syntax.…”

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Figurative Language Processing

“…The expression break the ice for example can easily convey both a literal (The trawler broke the ice) and a non-literal meaning (The welcome speech broke the ice) depending on the subject. Although recent work suggests that literal occurrences of VIDs generally are quite rare in comparison to the idiomatic ones (Savary et al, 2019), it remains a qualitatively major problem with the risk of serious errors due to wrong disambiguation.…”

Verbal Multiword Expression Identification: Do We Need a Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut?

“…License details: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.1 Henceforth, the lexicalized components of a MWE, i.e. those always realized by the same lexemes, appear in bold.2 Henceforth, literal and coincidental occurrences are highlighted with wavy underlining, following Savary et al (2019b).…”