Unified Representation for Non-compositional and Compositional
  Expressions
Ziheng Zeng Suma Bhat
Accurate processing of non-compositional language relies on generating good
representations for such expressions. In this work, we study the representation
of language non-compositionality by proposing a language model, PIER, that
builds on BART and can create semantically meaningful and contextually
appropriate representations for English potentially idiomatic expressions
(PIEs). PIEs are characterized by their non-compositionality and contextual
ambiguity in their literal and idiomatic interpretations. Via intrinsic
evaluation on embedding quality and extrinsic evaluation on PIE processing and
NLU tasks, we show that representations generated by PIER result in 33% higher
homogeneity score for embedding clustering than BART, whereas 3.12% and 3.29%
gains in accuracy and sequence accuracy for PIE sense classification and span
detection compared to the state-of-the-art IE representation model, GIEA. These
gains are achieved without sacrificing PIER's performance on NLU tasks (+/- 1%
accuracy) compared to BART.