Literal or idiomatic? Identifying the reading of single occurrences of German multiword expressions using word embeddings

Abstract

Non-compositional multiword expressions (MWEs) still pose serious issues for a variety of natural language processing tasks and their ubiquity makes it impossible to get around methods which automatically identify these kind of MWEs. The method presented in this paper was inspired by Sporleder and Li (2009) and is able to discriminate between the literal and non-literal use of an MWE in an unsupervised way. It is based on the assumption that words in a text form cohesive units. If the cohesion of these units is weakened by an expression, it is classified as literal, and otherwise as idiomatic. While Sporleder an Li used Normalized Google Distance to model semantic similarity, the present work examines the use of a variety of different word embeddings.