  Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase
can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these
constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms
is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic
similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been
replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist
(e.g., vectors [1] or language models [2]), and the choice of representation
affects the measurement of semantic similarity.
  We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as
ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity
between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance
and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in
compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments
with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that,
compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior
measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation
metrics considered.
