Automatic Detection of Idiomatic Clauses

We describe several experiments whose goal is to automatically identify idiomatic expressions in written text. We explore two approaches for the task: 1) idiom recognition as outlier detection; and 2) supervised classification of sentences. We apply principal component analysis for outlier detection. Detecting idioms as lexical outliers does not exploit class label information. So, in the following experiments, we use linear discriminant analysis to obtain a discriminant subspace and later use the three nearest neighbor classifier to obtain accuracy. We discuss pros and cons of each approach. All the approaches are more general than the previous algorithms for idiom detection - neither do they rely on target idiom types, lexicons, or large manually annotated corpora, nor do they limit the search space by a particular type of linguistic construction

Cross language priming extends to formulaic units: evidence from eye-tracking suggests that this idea “has legs”

Idiom priming effects (faster processing compared to novel phrases) are generally robust in native speakers but not non-native speakers. This leads to the question of how idioms and other multiword units are represented and accessed in a first (L1) and second language (L2). We address this by investigating the processing of translated Chinese idioms to determine whether known L1 combinations show idiom priming effects in non-native speakers when encountered in the L2. In two eye-tracking experiments we compared reading times for idioms vs. control phrases (Experiment 1) and for figurative vs. literal uses of idioms (Experiment 2). Native speakers of Chinese showed recognition of the L1 form in the L2, but figurative meanings were read more slowly than literal meanings, suggesting that the non-compositional nature of idioms makes them problematic in a non-native language. We discuss the results as they relate to crosslinguistic priming at the multiword level

When does assonance make L2 lexical phrases memorable?

Among the challenges that second language learners face is that of acquiring a large num-ber of lexical phrases such as collocations and idiomatic expressions (e.g. Pawley & Syder, 1983; Willis, 1990; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Lewis, 1993). There is evidence that post-childhood learners master this dimension of L2 vocabulary very slowly (e.g. Li & Schmitt, 2010; Laufer & Waldman, 2011). In recent years, researchers have tested diverse proposals about how learners can be helped to acquire L2 phrases (see Boers & Lind-stromberg, 2012). The factor we explore in the present article, however, is a phonological feature that may make word combinations relatively noticeable and easy to acquire, namely, assonance

Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

The Effect of etymology elaboration on EFL learners’ comprehension and retention of idioms

This article reports on a study that investigated the impact of etymological elaboration on EFL students’ comprehension and retention of English idioms. The participants for the study were 32 Iranian upper- intermediate EFL students. They were members of two intact classes randomly assigned to an experimental and a comparison group. The treatment lasted for six two-hour sessions, during each session of which the participants in both groups received five idioms which they were supposed to define. The participants in the experimental group received the idioms along with the pertinent etymological elaborations, while the participants in the comparison group received the same idioms without etymological elaborations. The results revealed that etymological elaboration has a positive effect on EFL students’ comprehension and subsequent retention of idioms

Normative data for idiomatic expressions

Peer reviewedPublisher PD