Finding the Neural Net: Deep-learning Idiom Type Identifcation from Distributional Vectors

The present work aims at automatically classifying Italian idiomatic and non-idiomatic phrases with a neural network model under constrains of data scarcity. Results are discussed in comparison with an existing unsupervised model devised for idiom type detection and a similar supervised classifier previously trained to detect metaphorical bigrams. The experiments suggest that the distributional context of a given phrase is sufficient to carry out idiom type identification to a satisfactory degree, with an increase in performance when input phrases are filtered according to human-elicited idiomaticity ratings collected for the same expressions. Crucially, employing concatenations of single word vectors rather than whole-phrase vectors as training input results in the worst performance for our models, differently from what was previously registered in metaphor detection tasks.