Meanings Of Constituent Words Research Articles

Leaving No Stone Unturned: Flexible Retrieval of Idiomatic Expressions from a Large Text Corpus

Idioms are multi-word expressions whose meaning cannot always be deduced from the literal meaning of constituent words. A key feature of idioms that is central to this paper is their peculiar mixture of fixedness and variability, which poses challenges for their retrieval from large corpora using traditional search approaches. These challenges hinder insights into idiom usage, affecting users who are conducting linguistic research as well as those involved in language education. To facilitate access to idiom examples taken from real-world contexts, we introduce an information retrieval system designed specifically for idioms. Given a search query that represents an idiom, typically in its canonical form, the system expands it automatically to account for the most common types of idiom variation including inflection, open slots, adjectival or adverbial modification and passivisation. As a by-product of query expansion, other types of idiom variation captured include derivation, compounding, negation, distribution across multiple clauses as well as other unforeseen types of variation. The system was implemented on top of Elasticsearch, an open-source, distributed, scalable, real-time search engine. Flexible retrieval of idioms is supported by a combination of linguistic pre-processing of the search queries, their translation into a set of query clauses written in a query language called Query DSL, and analysis, an indexing process that involves tokenisation and normalisation. Our system outperformed the phrase search in terms of recall and outperformed the keyword search in terms of precision. Out of the three, our approach was found to provide the best balance between precision and recall. By providing a fast and easy way of finding idioms in large corpora, our approach can facilitate further developments in fields such as linguistics, language education and natural language processing.

Divergent and convergent hemispheric processes in idiom comprehension: The role of idioms predictability

Abstract Idioms are a form of figurative language expressions in which their intended meaning is not derived from the meaning of constituent words. Previous studies examining hemispheric asymmetries in idiom comprehension argue about the relative contributions of the hemispheres to the figurative and literal processing. However, it is not clear what psycholinguistic factors may direct hemispheric asymmetries and the way in which figurative vs. literal interpretations are processed. In the current studs we report a behavioral study that examined whether idiom-irrelevant meanings are suppressed or retained as a function of visual field and the degree of predictability of the idioms. Native Hebrew speakers were presented with idioms in a semantic judgment task, where we manipulated visual field and predictability. The results seem to support the notion that a bi-hemispheric network is involved in idiom comprehension with prevalence for the left hemisphere. Overall, the results confirm the role of idioms predictability as the main factor that directs idiom comprehension and modulates hemispheric asymmetry in semantic processing.