CLIX: Cross-Lingual Explanations of Idiomatic Expressions
Aaron Gluck, Katharina Von Der Wense, Maria Leonor Pacheco
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{gluck-etal-2025-clix,
title = "{CLIX}: Cross-Lingual Explanations of Idiomatic Expressions",
author = "Gluck, Aaron and
Wense, Katharina Von Der and
Pacheco, Maria Leonor",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.233/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.233",
pages = "4515--4529",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}