Konidioms Corpus: A Dataset of Idioms in Konkani Language

Abstract

Konkani is a language spoken by a large number of people from the states located in the west coast of India. It is the official language of Goa state from the Indian subcontinent. Currently there is a lack of idioms corpus in the low-resource Konkani language. This paper aims to improve the progress in idiomatic sentence identification in order to enhance linguistic processing by creating the first corpus for idioms in the Konkani language. We select a unique list of 1597 idioms from multiple sources and proceed with a strictly controlled sentence creation procedure through crowdsourcing. This is followed by quality check of the sentences and annotation procedure by the experts in the Konkani language. We were able to build a good quality corpus comprising of 6520 sentences written in the Devanagari script of Konkani language. Analysis of the collected idioms and their usage in the created sentences revealed the dominance of selective domains like 'human body' in the creation and occurrences of idiomatic expressions in the Konkani language. This corpus is made publicly available.