Does BERT understand idioms? A probing-based empirical study of BERT encodings of idioms
Understanding idioms is important in NLP. In this paper, we study to what extent pre-trained BERT model can encode the meaning of a potentially idiomatic expression (PIE) in a certain context. We make use of a few existing datasets and perform two probing tasks: PIE usage classification and idiom pa...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | text |
| Language: | English |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
2021
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| Online Access: | https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/6722 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/7725/viewcontent/2021.ranlp_1.156.pdf |
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| Institution: | Singapore Management University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Understanding idioms is important in NLP. In this paper, we study to what extent pre-trained BERT model can encode the meaning of a potentially idiomatic expression (PIE) in a certain context. We make use of a few existing datasets and perform two probing tasks: PIE usage classification and idiom paraphrase identification. Our experiment results suggest that BERT indeed can separate the literal and idiomatic usages of a PIE with high accuracy. It is also able to encode the idiomatic meaning of a PIE to some extent. |
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