Our goal is to develop unsupervised means for the automatic acquisition of lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge about a broadly documented class of idiomatic expressions.
we focus on a cross-linguistically prominent class of phrasal idioms which are commonly and productively formed from the combination of a frequent verb and a noun in its direct object position (Cowie, Mackin, and McCaig 1983;Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994;Fellbaum 2002), for example, shoot the breeze, make a face, and push one's luck.