Extracting meaning by idiomaticity: Description of the HSemID system at CogALex VI (2020)

AbstractThe HSemID system, submitted to the CogALex VI Shared Task is a hybrid system relying mainly on metric clusters measured in large web corpora, complemented by a vector space model using cosine similarity to detect semantic associations. Although the system reached ra-ther weak results for the subcategories of synonyms, antonyms and hypernyms, with some dif-ferences from one language to another, it is able to measure general semantic associations (as being random or not-random) with an F1 score close to 0.80. The results strongly suggest that idiomatic constructions play a fundamental role in semantic associations. Further experiments are necessary in order to fine-tune the model to the subcategories of synonyms, antonyms, hy-pernyms and to explain surprising differences across languages. 1 Introduction