Modeling Idiom Variability with Entropy and Distributional Semantics

Abstract

In this paper we assessed the cognitive plausibility of corpus-based flexibility measures for a sample of Italian idioms taken from the normative data by Tabossi et al. (2011). We found that psycholinguistic judgments on idiom predictability, literality and syntactic flexibility can be modeled by distributional representations of idiom semantics, entropy-based formal flexibility measures, frequency and the number of fully lexicalized arguments of idioms.