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Description
The paper discusses the treatment of idioms in a learners’ dictionary. Although idioms have received a fair amount of treatment in literature, they still present a challenge for natural language applications. Idioms are lexical signs, which have an opaque meaning in the sense that it cannot be deduced from the meaning of individual components. Learners are not always successful at finding the desired information about the meaning and the usage conditions in dictionaries. This paper discusses a model for a detailed and accurate description of idioms in different language families. Currently the application enables multi-directional search for equivalents in English, Chinese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian, and may be extended in the future. Starting with the Korean idiom 식은 죽 먹기 ‘like eating cold porridge’ denoting culture-specific realia, the following zones are discussed: headword, definition, notions, equivalents, and examples.
