IDIOMS, NON‐LITERAL LANGUAGE AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION 1

There are two pertinent themes in the study of idioms in the area of natural language processing. Firstly, idioms should be defined and located in the space of non‐literal expressions. This will be the first aim of this paper. Secondly, a processing model should be developed. In this paper, the application of knowledge representation techniques in three different models for the representation and processing of idioms are discussed. The first, a symbolic procedural model extends the two‐level model which was originally developed in computational morphology. The second is a simple localist connectionist model. The third, a symbolic hierarchical model, represents idioms as part of a lexicon conceived as an inheritance hierarchy. A comparison between the models is made in which the focus lies on the resolution of the ambiguity of idioms, the relation between the literal and non‐literal interpretation and the syntactic flexibility of idiomatic expressions.

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