arXiv:2606. 02584v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Idiomatic expressions remain a persistent challenge for natural language processing because their meanings are often non-compositional, context-dependent, and difficult to align across languages.
arXiv:2607. 09576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an interpretable network-based framework for representing idiomatic and figurative meaning across eight typologically diverse languages, totaling 160 conventional expressions, the large majority of which are idiomatic.
arXiv:2607. 09576v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an interpretable network-based framework for representing idiomatic and figurative meaning across eight typologically diverse languages, totaling 160 conventional expressions, the large majority of which are idiomatic.
The paper introduces the first large‑scale benchmark dataset of Bangla idioms, along with a synthetic multiple‑choice question set for idiom meaning identification. It evaluates recent large language models on three idiom‑related tasks—paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and meaning identification—using zero‑shot and few‑shot prompting. Results show significant variability across models, with Phi‑4‑mini‑instruct best at paraphrasing, Kimi‑K2‑32b‑instruct excelling at span detection, and Gemini‑2.5‑flash leading in meaning identification.
arXiv:2606. 02147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Idiomatic expressions pose a major challenge for multilingual NLP because their meanings shift between figurative and literal usage, often requiring context for accurate interpretation.
The study investigates how multilingual training affects figurative language identification in proverbs, using 742 proverb concepts translated into seven languages. Five models—including multilingual encoders and instruction‑tuned LLMs—were evaluated with varying levels of multilingual supervision, and a new multidimensional annotation framework was introduced to classify proverbs into metaphorical, moral/advisory, cause‑effect, and culture‑specific forms. Results show that adding multilingual data beyond 50% yields limited gains, but the best supervision level depends on the model and language; combining diverse figurative forms improves overall performance, especially for the least frequent culture‑specific form.
arXiv:2607.00171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text embeddings are standard for semantic similarity tasks, yet their evaluation remains an open challenge. Current benchmarks are static, cover on...
Inspicio is an open‑vocabulary pipeline that links tokens in historical or low‑resource languages to synsets in the Open English WordNet without needing a source‑language sense inventory. It uses an instruction‑tuned LLM to generate two English translations, candidate dictionary definitions, and English lemmas, then performs hybrid retrieval combining dense definition similarity, sparse lemma matching, and Maximal Marginal Relevance re‑ranking. Evaluated on Latin, Ancient Greek, PREMOVE, and Italian data, the best configuration achieves 96% Recall@50 on a perception‑verb test set and remains competitive in out‑of‑domain and cross‑lingual scenarios.
The paper introduces a new benchmark for Urdu‑to‑English idiomatic translation, featuring 4,000 manually verified sentence pairs in both native Perso‑Arabic script and Romanized Urdu. It evaluates multiple tasks—translation, paraphrasing, idiom span detection, and back‑translation—using various prompting strategies, and finds that state‑of‑the‑art large language models outperform traditional neural machine translation systems, especially in preserving figurative meaning. The study also highlights challenges posed by the lack of standardized orthography in Romanized Urdu, which affects consistency and idiom span detection.
Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable. We present G-IdiomAlign, a gloss-pivoted benchmark where each idiom is anchored by an English gloss from Wiktionary.
Word Sense Disambiguation has advanced rapidly for English and a handful of well-resourced modern languages, but it continues to assume the existence of a sense inventory and a word-to-sense mapping i...
arXiv:2606. 18989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable.
MetaHOPE is an error‑severity‑aware annotation framework designed to evaluate how well machine translation (MT) and large language models (LLMs) translate metaphors. The authors applied MetaHOPE to three state‑of‑the‑art systems—GoogleMT, GPT5.4, and Hunyuan‑7b—using two human‑annotated metaphor corpora (VUAMC and PSUCMC) for English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English translation. They also produced a bilingual post‑edited gold reference, creating a new resource for metaphor translation research.