| Challenge: | Metaphor recognition systems that are based on language models perform substantially worse on unconventional metaphors than on conventional ones. |
| Approach: | They conduct a linguistic analysis of recent metaphor recognition systems based on language models and a variant of BERT language models to examine their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems show that they can recognise unseen words if synonyms or morphological variations have been seen before, leading to enhanced generalisation beyond word sense disambiguation. |
Similar Papers
Metaphor and Large Language Models: When Surface Features Matter More than Deep Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on metaphor processing have focused on single datasets and specific task settings, often using artificially constructed data through lexical replacement. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in metaphor interpretation across multiple datasets, tasks, and prompt configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are more realistic and efficient than current models and are more efficient than existing models. |
MetaPro 2.0: Computational Metaphor Processing on the Effectiveness of Anomalous Language Modeling (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for metaphor interpretation are slow due to lack of annotated datasets and effective pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a large annotated dataset and a PLM for the metaphor interpretation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on metaphor identification and interpretation with comparable baselines on the new dataset. |
The Interplay between Metaphors and NLP (2026.acl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial will provide an overview of the metaphor processing field. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an overview of the metaphor processing field . it will focus on recent directions opened by LLMs for metaphor interpretation . |
| Outcome: | The tutorial will discuss the influence of various metaphor theories on the creation of annotated resources and models. |
Word Embedding and WordNet Based Metaphor Identification and Interpretation (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models cannot identify exact metaphorical words within a sentence . current models do not rely on hand-crafted knowledge for training . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised learning method that identifies and interprets metaphors at word-level without preprocessing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models in two translation systems for English to Chinese showing that it paraphrases metaphors into their literal counterparts. |
Construction Artifacts in Metaphor Identification Datasets (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing metaphor identification datasets can be gamed by completely ignoring the potential metaphorical expression or the context in which it occurs. |
| Approach: | They show that existing metaphor identification datasets can be gamed by fully ignoring the potential metaphorical expression or the context in which it occurs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be gamed by fully ignoring the potential metaphorical expression or the context in which it occurs. |
Metaphors in Pre-Trained Language Models: Probing and Generalization Across Datasets and Languages (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained language models assume they encode metaphorical knowledge useful for NLP systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to probing metaphoricity information in PLMs and measure their generalization . they find that contextual representations in PMLs encode metaphorical knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode metaphorical knowledge across languages and datasets . the model can be used to train and test NLP systems . |
A Corpus of Metaphor Novelty Scores for Syntactically-Related Word Pairs (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data on metaphor novelty are limited, making it difficult to perform research on this topic. |
| Approach: | They propose to release a corpus of metaphor novelty scores for syntactically related word pairs . they establish a performance benchmark to which future researchers can compare . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus of metaphor novelty scores is compared to other datasets . it performs better than chance or nave strategies, the authors show . |
Recent advances in neural metaphor processing: A linguistic, cognitive and social perspective (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Metaphor processing systems have benefited from recent studies on the role of metaphor in communication and deep learning for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They present a review of automated metaphor processing and discuss their results from downstream NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on the findings of a systematic and comprehensive survey of metaphor processing systems published five years ago. |
Automatic Extraction of Metaphoric Analogies from Literary Texts: Task Formulation, Dataset Construction, and Evaluation (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Joanne Boisson, Zara Siddique, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Dimosthenis Antypas, Luis Espinosa Anke, Jose Camacho-Collados
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown to be difficult to extract metaphors from free text because they can involve some implicit concepts and link dissimilar concepts. |
| Approach: | They compare the ability of large language models to extract metaphors from literary texts using domain experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can extract metaphors from literary texts without using domain experts. |
Towards Explainable Evaluation of Language Models on the Semantic Similarity of Visual Concepts (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Maria Lymperaiou, George Manoliadis, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Edmund G. Dervakos, Giorgos Stamou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP research have focused on robustness and explainability issues of their evaluation strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained transformers to evaluate semantic similarity for visual vocabularies . they propose to provide explainable metrics for understanding the quality of retrieved instances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics highlight inabilities of widely used evaluation methods and highlight weaknesses in learned linguistic representations. |