@inproceedings{phelps-etal-2024-sign,
    title = "Sign of the Times: Evaluating the use of Large Language Models for Idiomaticity Detection",
    author = "Phelps, Dylan  and
      Pickard, Thomas M. R.  and
      Mi, Maggie  and
      Gow-Smith, Edward  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    editor = {Bhatia, Archna  and
      Bouma, Gosse  and
      Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza  and
      Evang, Kilian  and
      Garcia, Marcos  and
      Giouli, Voula  and
      Han, Lifeng  and
      Nivre, Joakim  and
      Rademaker, Alexandre},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.mwe-1.22",
    pages = "178--187",
    abstract = "Despite the recent ubiquity of large language models and their high zero-shot prompted performance across a wide range of tasks, it is still not known how well they perform on tasks which require processing of potentially idiomatic language. In particular, how well do such models perform in comparison to encoder-only models fine-tuned specifically for idiomaticity tasks? In this work, we attempt to answer this question by looking at the performance of a range of LLMs (both local and software-as-a-service models) on three idiomaticity datasets: SemEval 2022 Task 2a, FLUTE, and MAGPIE. Overall, we find that whilst these models do give competitive performance, they do not match the results of fine-tuned task-specific models, even at the largest scales (e.g. for GPT-4). Nevertheless, we do see consistent performance improvements across model scale. Additionally, we investigate prompting approaches to improve performance, and discuss the practicalities of using LLMs for these tasks.",
}

Despite the recent ubiquity of large language models and their high zero-shot prompted performance across a wide range of tasks, it is still not known how well they perform on tasks which require processing of potentially idiomatic language. In particular, how well do such models perform in comparison to encoder-only models fine-tuned specifically for idiomaticity tasks? In this work, we attempt to answer this question by looking at the performance of a range of LLMs (both local and software-as-a-service models) on three idiomaticity datasets: SemEval 2022 Task 2a, FLUTE, and MAGPIE. Overall, we find that whilst these models do give competitive performance, they do not match the results of fine-tuned task-specific models, even at the largest scales (e.g. for GPT-4). Nevertheless, we do see consistent performance improvements across model scale. Additionally, we investigate prompting approaches to improve performance, and discuss the practicalities of using LLMs for these tasks.
Phelps, Dylan Pickard, Thomas M. R. Mi, Maggie Gow-Smith, Edward Villavicencio, Aline
Sign of the Times: Evaluating the use of Large Language Models for Idiomaticity Detection