Idiom token classification using sentential distributed semantics

Abstract

Idiom token classification is the task of deciding for a set of potentially idiomatic phrases whether each occurrence of a phrase is a literal or idiomatic usage of the phrase. In this work we explore the use of Skip-Thought Vectors to create distributed representations that encode features that are predictive with respect to idiom token classification. We show that classifiers using these representations have competitive performance compared with the state of the art in idiom token classification. Importantly, however, our models use only the sentence containing the target phrase as input and are thus less dependent on a potentially inaccurate or incomplete model of discourse context. We further demonstrate the feasibility of using these representations to train a competitive general idiom token classifier.