CLIX: Cross-Lingual Explanations of Idiomatic Expressions

TL;DR

CLIX introduces a new task for generating cross-lingual explanations of idiomatic expressions to aid language learners, highlighting current NLP models' potential and challenges.

Contribution

The paper defines the CLIX task, evaluates NLP models' performance on it, and provides an error analysis to guide future improvements.

Findings

Large language models show promise for CLIX tasks.

Current models face significant challenges in accurately explaining idiomatic expressions.

Error analysis identifies key areas for future research.

Abstract

Automated definition generation systems have been proposed to support vocabulary expansion for language learners. The main barrier to the success of these systems is that learners often struggle to understand definitions due to the presence of potentially unfamiliar words and grammar, particularly when non-standard language is involved. To address these challenges, we propose CLIX, the task of Cross-Lingual explanations of Idiomatic eXpressions. We explore the capabilities of current NLP models for this task, and observe that while it remains challenging, large language models show promise. Finally, we perform a detailed error analysis to highlight the key challenges that need to be addressed before we can reliably incorporate these systems into educational tools.