# IdioLink: Retrieving Meaning Beyond Words Across Idiomatic and Literal Expressions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22247 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22247/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07597/) (2023)
- [ColBERTv2: Effective and Efficient Retrieval via Lightweight Late Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01488/) (2021)
- [Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05672/) (2024)
- [One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09741/) (2022)
- [Jasper and Stella: distillation of SOTA embedding models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19048/) (2024)
- [Task-aware Retrieval with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09260/) (2022)
- [Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04701/) (2024)
- [FollowIR: Evaluating and Teaching Information Retrieval Models to Follow Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15246/) (2024)
- [SNCSE: Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding with Soft Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05979/) (2022)
- [SemEval-2022 Task 2: Multilingual Idiomaticity Detection and Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10050/) (2022)
- [Training Sparse Mixture Of Experts Text Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07972/) (2025)
- [Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retriever](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16672/) (2024)
- [EPIE Dataset: A Corpus For Possible Idiomatic Expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09479/) (2020)
- [Idiomatic Expression Identification using Semantic Compatibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10064/) (2021)
- [DRAMA: Diverse Augmentation from Large Language Models to Smaller Dense Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18460/) (2025)
- [Sign of the Times: Evaluating the use of Large Language Models for Idiomaticity Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09279/) (2024)
- [A Hard Nut to Crack: Idiom Detection with Conversational Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10579/) (2024)
- [Rolling the DICE on Idiomaticity: How LLMs Fail to Grasp Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16069/) (2024)
- [Idiomatic Expression Paraphrasing without Strong Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08592/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Idiomatic Representation in Multiple Languages via an Adaptive Contrastive Triplet Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15175/) (2024)
- [Memorization or Reasoning? Exploring the Idiom Understanding of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16216/) (2025)

## 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.