An ensemble model for classifying idioms and literal texts using BERT and RoBERTa

An idiom is a common phrase that means something other than its literal meaning. Detecting idioms automatically is a serious challenge in natural language processing (NLP) domain applications like information retrieval (IR), machine translation and chatbot. Automatic detection of Idioms plays an important role in all these applications. A fundamental NLP task is text classification, which categorizes text into structured categories known as text labeling or categorization. This paper deals with idiom identification as a text classification task. Pre-trained deep learning models have been used for several text classification tasks; though models like BERT and RoBERTa have not been exclusively used for idiom and literal classification. We propose a predictive ensemble model to classify idioms and literals using BERT and RoBERTa, fine-tuned with the TroFi dataset. The model is tested with a newly created in house dataset of idioms and literal expressions, numbering 1470 in all, and annotated by domain experts. Our model outperforms the baseline models in terms of the metrics considered, such as F-score and accuracy, with a 2% improvement in accuracy.