Are idioms surprising?

This study focuses on the identification of English Idiomatic Expressions (IE) using an information theoretic model. In the focus are verb-noun constructions only. We notice significant differences in semantic surprisal and information density between IE-data and literals-data. Surprisingly, surprisal and information density in the IE-data and in a large reference data set do not differ significantly, while, in contrast, we observe significant differences between literals and a large reference data set.

Poster | BibTex | https://aclanthology.org/2023.konvens-main.15/