Automatically constructing a lexicon of verb phrase idiomatic combinations

Abstract

We investigate the lexical and syntactic flexibility of a class of idiomatic expressions. We develop measures that draw on such linguistic properties, and demonstrate that these statistical, corpus-based measures can be successfully used for distinguishing idiomatic combinations from non-idiomatic ones. We also propose a means for automatically determining which syntactic forms a particular idiom can appear in, and hence should be included in its lexical representation. 1