Parsing decomposable idioms

Parsing decomposable idioms Ingrid Fischer and Martina Keil IMMDII, University of Erlangen Martensstr. 3 91058 Erlangen, Germany {idfische, keil}@informat ik. uni-erlangen, de Abstract Verbal idioms can be divided into two main groups: non-compositional id- ioms as kick the bucket and composi- tional/decomposable idioms as spill the beans. In the following we will point to the fact that there are German de- composable idioms which can be decom- posed into components, having identifi- able meanings contributing to the mean- ing of the whole. These idiom compo- imnts are taken to have referents. Taking these facts into account we propose an adequate way to represent the idiomatic meaning by Kamp's Discourse Represen- tation Theory (DRT). Furthermore, we show how to parse idiomatic sentences and how to process the proposed seinan- tic representation. While parsing id- ioms, the necessary idiomatic knowledge of the idioms' syntax and semantics is ex- tracted from a special idiomatic knowl- edge base called PIIRASEO-LI.]X. 1 Introduction Today it becomes more and more evident that a too restricted view on idiomatic phenomena is of limited use for the purpose of natural language processing. Therefore, it is now widely accepted that we have to distinguish at least two groups of figurative verbal phrasal idioms: first, there is a group of syntactically frozen idioms as kick the bucket, meaning "die", which are called non- compositional. Second, there is a group which shows more syntactic and semantic flexibility. An example for the ,latter group, often called compo- sitional or decomposable I idioms, is spill the beans 1 By classfying idioms with the terms compositional respectively decomposable the same property is de- cribed by two different point of views. The first notion is a more structural term, the second notion a more process oriented term. See (Geeraerts, 1992). nleaning "divulge infbrnmtion". With this group we are dealing here in depth. In this paper we propose an adequate semantic representation for idiomatic knowledge and show a way of processing syntax and semantics of decomposable idioms. In the following we will first; deal with the idea of decomposability of idioms in section 2. In sec- tion 3 we will present our proposal of an ade- quate representation of the idioms' meaning by means of DRT. Before we will outline a way of processing decomposable idioms in section 5, we will briefly introduce the necessary tools for the parsing process in a few brief words in section 4. Finally, in section 6 we show some possible exten- sions. 2 Decomposable idioms and the referential status of their idiom chunks hi contrast to non-compositional idioms, decom- posable idioms arc; able to undergo several syntac- tic operations that lead to the opinion that "pieces of an idiom typically have identifiable meanings which combine to produce the meaning of the whole" (Wasow, 1982). As example, we consider the syntactic behavior of the German verbal idioms cinch Bock schieflcn (lit.: "shoot; a buck", fig.: "make a mistake", fig. eq.: "make a bloomer") 2 and jmdm. einen B&'cn aufbindcn (lit.: "tie …

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