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 .

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Metaphor and Large Language Models: When Surface Features Matter More than Deep Understanding (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
Does GPT-3 Grasp Metaphors? Identifying Metaphor Mappings with Generative Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to detect whether natural language sequences are metaphoric or literal focus on detecting the transfer of knowledge structures to pre-trained language models.
Approach: They propose to probe the ability of GPT-3 to detect metaphoric language and predict the metaphor’s source domain without any pre-set domains.
Outcome: The proposed model generates the correct source domain for a new sample with an accuracy of 65.15% in English and 34.65% in Spanish.
MetaPro 2.0: Computational Metaphor Processing on the Effectiveness of Anomalous Language Modeling (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
CATE: A Contrastive Pre-trained Model for Metaphor Detection with Semi-supervised Learning (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for metaphor detection require a large amount of labeled data and are not linguistically-based.
Approach: They propose a ContrAstive pre-Trained modEl (CATE) for metaphor detection with semi-supervised learning using a pre-trained model to obtain a contextual representation of target words.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on several benchmark datasets and achieves better performance against state-of-the-art models.
Probing Pretrained Language Models for Lexical Semantics (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on morphosyntactic, semantic, and world knowledge, but it remains unclear to what extent LMs derive lexical type-level knowledge from words in context.
Approach: They propose to use multilingual and monolingual LMs to extract lexical type-level knowledge from words in context.
Outcome: The proposed models perform well across six typologically diverse languages and five lexical tasks.
Probing Relational Knowledge in Language Models via Word Analogies (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on probing relational knowledge by filling the blanks in pre-defined prompts such as “The capital of France is —” but these are affected by the co-occurrence of target relation words and entities in the pre-training corpus.
Approach: They extend probing methodologies by using analogical proportions as a proxy to probe relational knowledge in transformer-based PLMs without directly presenting the desired relation.
Outcome: The proposed methods are extremely accurate at (1) and (2), but have room for improvement for (3).
Neural Metaphor Detection in Context (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing models focus on limited forms of linguistic context, such as unigrams.
Approach: They propose end-to-end neural models for detecting metaphorical word use in context . they show that bi-directional biLSTM models which operate on complete sentences work well .
Outcome: The proposed models show that they can learn rich contextual word representations . they are compared to previous models which focused on limited linguistic context .
The Interplay between Metaphors and NLP (2026.acl-tutorials)

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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.
How Abstract Is Linguistic Generalization in Large Language Models? Experiments with Argument Structure (2023.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Competent speakers of a language know how likely a word w is to appear in a specific context .
Approach: They use transformer-based large language models to generalize a novel noun argument . they show a bias to generalise based on linear order, instead of a linear order .
Outcome: The proposed models perform well in generalizing the distribution of a novel noun argument between related contexts that were seen during pre-training.
Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Metaphor understanding is an essential task for large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose to evaluate the metaphor understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) the metaphor understanding challenge dataset provides over 10k paraphrases and 1.5k instances of inapt paraphrase.
Outcome: The metaphor understanding challenge dataset evaluates the performance of large language models on a range of NLU tasks.

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