mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

IdioLink: Retrieving Meaning Beyond Words Across Idiomatic and Literal Expressions

arXiv 2605.22247 ↗First posted 21 May 2026cs.CLcited by 0

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Idioms pose a fundamental challenge for language models, as their meaning cannot be inferred from surface form alone. Understanding such expressions, therefore, requires semantic abstraction beyond lexical overlap. We introduce IdioLink, a retrieval benchmark designed to test whether models can link idiomatic expressions to conceptually equivalent meanings expressed in literal or paraphrased forms. IdioLink comprises 10,700 documents and 2,140 queries, spanning 107 idioms with both literal and figurative uses. Each document and query is annotated with spans that convey the core meaning. Evaluating strong embedding baselines (e.g., BGE, E5, Contriever, and Qwen), we show that current models struggle to retrieve equivalent meanings across divergent surface realizations, relying instead on topical and shallow semantic cues. IdioLink exposes key gaps in idiom-aware semantic retrieval and provides a challenging testbed for future models.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 35 of its 73 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

Builds on

35 of 73 references.

References · 35

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Taskscited by 9,160
  2. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  3. 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
  4. 2021SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddingscited by 2,168
  5. 2022Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-trainingcited by 1,216
  6. 2021Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learningcited by 1,203
  7. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
  8. 2024M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillationcited by 1,050
  9. 2023Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learningcited by 705
  10. 2023C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddingscited by 556
  11. 2021ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interactioncited by 464
  12. 2024Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Reportcited by 357
23 more
  1. 2022One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddingscited by 329
  2. 2024Jasper and Stella: distillation of SOTA embedding modelscited by 109
  3. 2022Task-aware Retrieval with Instructionscited by 107
  4. 2024Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Modelscited by 70
  5. 2024FollowIR: Evaluating and Teaching Information Retrieval Models to Follow Instructionscited by 67
  6. 2022SNCSE: Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding with Soft Negative Samplescited by 39
  7. 2022SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embeddingcited by 36
  8. 2025Training Sparse Mixture Of Experts Text Embedding Modelscited by 32
  9. 2024Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retrievercited by 25
  10. 2020EPIE Dataset: A Corpus For Possible Idiomatic Expressionscited by 24
  11. 2021Idiomatic Expression Identification using Semantic Compatibilitycited by 19
  12. 2025DRAMA: Diverse Augmentation from Large Language Models to Smaller Dense Retrieverscited by 19
  13. 2024Sign of the Times: Evaluating the use of Large Language Models for Idiomaticity Detectioncited by 11
  14. 2024A Hard Nut to Crack: Idiom Detection with Conversational Large Language Modelscited by 11
  15. 2024Rolling the DICE on Idiomaticity: How LLMs Fail to Grasp Contextcited by 11
  16. 2021Idiomatic Expression Paraphrasing without Strong Supervisioncited by 7
  17. 2024Enhancing Idiomatic Representation in Multiple Languages via an Adaptive Contrastive Triplet Losscited by 7
  18. 2025Memorization or Reasoning? Exploring the Idiom Understanding of LLMscited by 7
  19. 2020MTLB-STRUCT @PARSEME 2020: Capturing Unseen Multiword Expressions Using Multi-task Learning and Pre-trained Masked Language Modelscited by 6
  20. 2023DebCSE: Rethinking Unsupervised Contrastive Sentence Embedding Learning in the Debiasing Perspectivecited by 5
  21. 2023KPEval: Towards Fine-Grained Semantic-Based Keyphrase Evaluationcited by 4
  22. 2021Gamified Crowdsourcing for Idiom Corpora Constructioncited by 3
  23. 2021Semantic Search as Extractive Paraphrase Span Detectioncited by 2

Built on by

Not cited yet.