Automatically Constructing a Lexicon of Verb Phrase Idiomatic Combinations

We investigate the lexical and syntactic flexibility of a class of idiomatic expressions. We develop measures that draw on such linguistic properties, and demonstrate that these statistical, corpus-based measures can be successfully used for distinguishing idiomatic combinations from non-idiomatic ones. We also propose a means for automatically determining which syntactic forms a particular idiom can appear in, and hence should be included in its lexical representation.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: EACL
• Authors: Afsaneh Fazly, Suzanne Stevenson
• Keywords: EACL 2006, Idiomatic Combinations, Idiomatic Expressions, Natural Language Processing, Syntactic Flexibility