Characterizing Idioms: Conventionality and Contingency
This addresses a linguistic theory problem for researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackled the problem of characterizing idioms by defining measures for conventionality and contingency, using BERT and XLNet to show that idioms fall at the expected intersection of these dimensions without correlation, suggesting no need for special theoretical machinery.
Idioms are unlike most phrases in two important ways. First, the words in an idiom have non-canonical meanings. Second, the non-canonical meanings of words in an idiom are contingent on the presence of other words in the idiom. Linguistic theories differ on whether these properties depend on one another, as well as whether special theoretical machinery is needed to accommodate idioms. We define two measures that correspond to the properties above, and we implement them using BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and XLNet(Yang et al., 2019). We show that idioms fall at the expected intersection of the two dimensions, but that the dimensions themselves are not correlated. Our results suggest that special machinery to handle idioms may not be warranted.