Does BERT understand idioms? A probing-based empirical study of BERT encodings of idioms

• Main Authors: TAN, Minghuan, JIANG, Jing
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems; Programming Languages and Compilers
• 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
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.