¿Y si una computadora pudiera entender los dichos mexicanos?

What do expressions like “colgar los tenis” (kick the bucket) or “dejar con el ojo cuadrado” (knock someone's socks off) have in common? Both are verbal idioms, meaning combinations of words that include a verb, whose meaning can’t be literally deduced by analyzing each term separately. These expressions are part of Mexican Spanish and reflect cultural, social, and emotional aspects that often deviate from traditional grammatical rules. But what happens when we try to detect these expressions automatically in digital texts? In this article, we explore how to teach computers to recognize them, with the goal of helping machines better understand how we speak in everyday life.