Idioms and titles
SUD offers several traits which allow annotators to mark idiomatic expressions and titles while still preserving the internal syntactic relationships between their various components. We have decided to distinguish these two categories from Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs), which represent a broader category which also includes named entities.
For our purposes, “titles” refer to any title given to a film, book, painting, or other work of art, such as Planet of the Apes, Dark Side of the Moon, American Gothic, or Super Mario Bros. However, this excludes other named entities like events, holidays or locations, such as The Gulf War, Good Friday, or The Eiffel Tower.
Idioms, meanwhile, refer to any figurative expression ranging from classic examples like kick the bucket to to extremely common phrases like in general whose precise meaning cannot directly be deduced from its constituents. Pronominal verbs, such as those common in Romance languages, are also treated as idioms.
Idioms and titles are annotated in the following way:
- The head of the idiom or title contains the feature
Idiom=Yes
orTitle=Yes
- The head also contains an “external part of speech” feature (
ExtPos
) which denotes the element’s function within the wider sentence. Please note that all titles will carry theExtPos
value ofPROPN
. - The remaining components of the element will contain the feature
InIdiom=Yes
orInTitle=Yes
.
This approach has several advantages. By marking these categories with features rather than a fixed
relation, we are able to preserve its internal syntactic relationships.
NB: Until version 2.8, the feature PhraseType=Idiom
was used for the head of idioms (now replaced by Idiom=Yes
) and the feature PhraseType=Title
was used for the head of titles (now replaced by Title=Yes
)
With internal syntactic relations
English
English
English
Spanish
Without internal syntactic relations
When there is no clear internal syntactic structure, the relation unk
is used.
English
French