Croatia

The goal of this paper is to learn more about how idiomatic information is structurally encoded in embeddings, using a structural probing method. We repurpose an existing English verbal multi-word expression (MWE) dataset to suit the probing framework and perform a comparative probing study of static (GloVe) and contextual (BERT) embeddings. Our experiments indicate that both encode some idiomatic information to varying degrees, but yield conflicting evidence as to whether idiomaticity is encoded in the vector norm, leaving this an open question. We also identify some limitations of the used dataset and highlight important directions for future work in improving its suitability for a probing analysis.

EACL 2023

Idioms, Probing and Dangerous Things: Towards Structural Probing for Idiomaticity in Vector Space

vector norm

multi-word expressions

idiomaticity

structural probing

probing

interpretability

semantics

language models

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

An open question in language comprehension studies is whether non-compositional multiword expressions like idioms and compositional-but-frequent word sequences are processed differently. Are the latter constructed online, or are instead directly retrieved from the lexicon, with a degree of entrenchment depending on their frequency?

In this paper, we address this question with two different methodologies. First, we set up a self-paced reading experiment comparing human reading times for idioms and both high-frequency and low-frequency compositional word sequences. Then, we ran the same experiment using the Surprisal metrics computed with Neural Language Models (NLMs).

Our results provide evidence that idiomatic and high-frequency compositional expressions are processed similarly by both humans and NLMs.
Additional experiments were run to test the possible factors that could affect the NLMs' performance.

Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-Paced Reading and Language Models

Multiword expression (MWE) identification has been the focus of numerous research papers, especially in the context of the DiMSUM and PARSEME Shared Tasks (STs). This survey analyses 40 MWE identification papers with experiments on data from these STs. We look at corpus selection, pre- and post-processing, MWE encoding, evaluation metrics, statistical significance, and error analyses. We find that these aspects are usually considered minor and/or omitted in the literature. However, they may considerably impact the results and the conclusions drawn from them. Therefore, we advocate for more systematic descriptions of experimental conditions to reduce the risk of misleading conclusions drawn from poorly designed experimental setup.


A Survey of MWE Identification Experiments: The Devil is in the Details

We present version 1.3 of the PARSEME multilingual corpus annotated with verbal multiword expressions. Since the previous version, new languages have joined the undertaking of creating such a resource, some of the already existing corpora have been enriched with new annotated texts, while others have been enhanced in various ways. This fourth release (v.1.3) is the first one to cover the union of all the languages included in the previous three releases. The PARSEME multilingual corpus represents 26 languages now. All monolingual corpora therein use Universal Dependencies v.2 tagset. They are (re-)split observing the PARSEME v.1.2 standard, which puts an impact on unseen VMWEs. With the current iteration, the corpus release process has been detached from shared tasks; instead, a process for continuous improvement and systematic releases has been introduced.

PARSEME corpus release 1.3

The identification of Verbal Multiword Expressions (VMWEs) presents a greater challenge compared to non-verbal MWEs due to their higher surface variability. VMWEs are linguistic units that exhibit varying levels of semantic opaqueness and pose difficulties for computational models in terms of both their identification and the degree of compositionality. In this study, a new approach to predicting the compositional nature of VMWEs in Persian is presented. The method begins with an automatic identification of VMWEs in Persian sentences, which is approached as a sequence labeling problem for recognizing the components of VMWEs. The method then creates word embeddings that better capture the semantic properties of VMWEs and uses them to determine the degree of compositionality through multiple criteria. The study compares two neural architectures for identification, BiLSTM and ParsBERT, and shows that a fine-tuned BERT model surpasses the BiLSTM model in evaluation metrics with an F1 score of 89%. Next, a word2vec embedding model is trained to capture the semantics of identified VMWEs and is used to estimate their compositionality, resulting in an accuracy of 70.9% as demonstrated by experiments on a collected dataset of expert-annotated compositional and non-compositional VMWEs.

Predicting Compositionality of Verbal Multiword Expressions in Persian

Multiword expressions are a key ingredient for developing large-scale and linguistically sound natural language processing technology. This paper describes our improvements in automatically identifying Romanian multiword expressions on the corpus released for the PARSEME v1.2 shared task. Our approach assumes a multilingual perspective based on the recently introduced lateral inhibition layer and adversarial training to boost the performance of the employed multilingual language models. With the help of these two methods, we improve the F1-score of XLM-RoBERTa by approximately 2.7% on unseen multiword expressions, the main task of the PARSEME 1.2 edition. In addition, our results can be considered SOTA performance, as they outperform the previous results on Romanian obtained by the participants in this competition.

Romanian Multiword Expression Detection Using Multilingual Adversarial Training and Lateral Inhibition

This paper shines a light on the potential of definition-based semantic models for detecting idiomatic and semi-idiomatic multiword expressions (MWEs) in clinical terminology. Our study focuses on biomedical entities defined in the UMLS ontology and aims to help prioritize the translation efforts of these entities. In particular, we develop an effective tool for scoring the idiomaticity of biomedical MWEs based on the degree of similarity between the semantic representations of those MWEs and a weighted average of the representation of their constituents. We achieve this using a biomedical language model trained to produce similar representations for entity names and their definitions, called BioLORD. The importance of this definition-based approach is highlighted by comparing the BioLORD model to two other state-of-the-art biomedical language models based on Transformer: SapBERT and CODER. Our results show that the BioLORD model has a strong ability to identify idiomatic MWEs, not replicated in other models. Our corpus-free idiomaticity estimation helps ontology translators to focus on more challenging MWEs.

Detecting Idiomatic Multiword Expressions in Clinical Terminology using Definition-Based Representation Learning

In this paper, we considered new cross-lingual settings for the SemEval 2022 task 2 subtask A and PARSEME 1.2 shared tasks, in which models are evaluated on languages that are not seen during training. Our findings indicate that language models are able to learn information about MWEs and idiomaticity that is not language-specific. Our findings further show that additional training data from other languages can be leveraged to give improvements over monolingual models for identifying MWEs and predicting idiomaticity.

Token-level Identification of Multiword Expressions using Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models

Investigating the Effects of MWE Identification in Structural Topic Modelling

We present a graph-based tool which can be used to explore Verbal Multi-Word Expression (VMWE) annotated in the Parseme project.
The tool can be used for linguistic exploration on the data, for helping the manual annotation process and to search for errors or inconsistencies in the annotations.

Graph-based multi-layer querying in Parseme Corpora

This paper describes the process of annotation of 996 lexical bundles (LB) assigned to 39 different discourse functions in a Spanish academic corpus. The purpose of the annotation is to obtain a new Spanish gold-standard corpus of 1,800,000 words useful for training and evaluating computational models that are capable of identifying automatically LBs for each context in new corpora, as well as for linguistic analysis about the role of LBs in academic discourse. The annotation process revealed that correspondence between LBs and discourse functions is not biunivocal and that the degree of ambiguity is high, so linguists’ contribution has been essential for improving the automatic assignation of tags.

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Are Frequent Phrases Directly Retrieved like Idioms? An Investigation with Self-Paced Reading and Language Models