A word embedding approach to identifying verb-noun idiomatic combinations

Abstract

Verb-noun idiomatic combinations (VNICs) are idioms consisting of a verb with a noun in its direct object position. Usages of these expressions can be ambiguous between an idiomatic usage and a literal combination. In this paper we propose supervised and unsupervised approaches, based on word embeddings, to identifying token instances of VNICs. Our proposed supervised and unsupervised approaches perform better than the supervised and unsupervised approaches of Fazly et al. (2009), respectively.