non-compositional

English

Alternative forms

• noncompositional

Etymology

From non- +‎ compositional.

Adjective

non-compositional

1. Not compositional.

   Antonym: compositional

   • 2007, Faye Rochelle Baron, Identifying non-compositional idioms in text using WordNet synsets‎^[1]:

     Any natural language processing system that does not have a knowledge of non-compositional idioms and their interpretation will make mistakes. Previous authors have attempted to automatically identify these expressions through the property of non-substitutability: similar words cannot be successfully substituted for words in non-compositional idiom expressions without changing their meaning.

   • 2019, Jack Halpern, Lexicographic Criteria for Selecting Multiword Units for MT Lexicons‎^[2]:

     The recognition and accurate translation of proper nouns, many of which are bilingually non-compositional, are a major issue in MT and other NLP applications. This is especially true for Chinese and Japanese, whose scripts present linguistic and algorithmic challenges not found in other languages.

   • 2019, Alyssa Hwang, Christopher Hidey, Confirming the Non-compositionality of Idioms for Sentiment Analysis‎^[3]:

     An idiom is defined as a non-compositional multiword expression, one whose meaning cannot be deduced from the definitions of the component words.

Usage notes

• non-compositional is more common than compositional, reaching the factor 2.5 in 2019.

Derived terms

• non-compositionality