Catching Idiomatic Expressions in EFL Essays
Michael Flor, Beata Beigman Klebanov · 2018
This paper presents an exploratory study on large-scale detection of idiomatic expressions in essays written by non-native speakers of English.We describe a computational search procedure for automatic detection of idiom-candidate phrases in essay texts.The study used a corpus of essays written during a standardized examination of English language proficiency.Automatically-flagged candidate expressions were manually annotated for idiomaticity.The study found that idioms are widely used in EFL essays.The study also showed that a search algorithm that accommodates the syntactic and lexical flexibility of idioms can increase the recall of idiom instances by 30%, but it also increases the amount of false positives.