Related papers: It's not Rocket Science : Interpreting Figurative …
Figurative and metaphorical language are commonplace in discourse, and figurative expressions play an important role in communication and cognition. However, figurative language has been a relatively under-studied area in NLP, and it…
When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into…
Idiomatic and figurative language form a large portion of colloquial speech and writing. With social media, this informal language has become more easily observable to people and trainers of large language models (LLMs) alike. While the…
Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor…
Figurative language is a challenge for language models since its interpretation is based on the use of words in a way that deviates from their conventional order and meaning. Yet, humans can easily understand and interpret metaphors,…
The ability to process idiomatic or literal multiword expressions is a crucial aspect of understanding and generating any language. The task of generating contextually relevant continuations for narratives containing idiomatic (or literal)…
Massive language models are the core of modern NLP modeling and have been shown to encode impressive amounts of commonsense and factual information. However, that knowledge exists only within the latent parameters of the model, inaccessible…
Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP. Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in…
English has long been assumed the $\textit{lingua franca}$ of scientific research, and this notion is reflected in the natural language processing (NLP) research involving scientific document representation. In this position piece, we…
This work explores the connection between (non-)literalness and plausibility at the example of subject-verb-object events in English. We design a systematic setup of plausible and implausible event triples in combination with abstract and…
Figures of speech help people express abstract concepts and evoke stronger emotions than literal expressions, thereby making texts more creative and engaging. Due to its pervasive and fundamental character, figurative language understanding…
Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text,…
This study addresses the gap in the literature concerning the comparative performance of LLMs in interpreting different types of figurative language across multiple languages. By evaluating LLMs using two multilingual datasets on simile and…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit increasingly sophisticated linguistic capabilities, yet the extent to which these behaviors reflect human-like cognition versus advanced pattern recognition remains an open question. In this study, we…
The success of neural networks on a diverse set of NLP tasks has led researchers to question how much these networks actually ``know'' about natural language. Probes are a natural way of assessing this. When probing, a researcher chooses a…
Building systems that achieve a deeper understanding of language is one of the central goals of natural language processing (NLP). Towards this goal, recent works have begun to train language models on narrative datasets which require…
Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language and constantly being added to a language. Owing to their non-compositionality and their ability to take on a figurative or literal meaning depending on the sentential context,…
Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and idioms are integral parts of human communication. They are ubiquitous in many forms of discourse, allowing people to convey complex, abstract ideas and evoke emotion. As figurative forms are…
We introduce a collection of recognizing textual entailment (RTE) datasets focused on figurative language. We leverage five existing datasets annotated for a variety of figurative language -- simile, metaphor, and irony -- and frame them…
Static concreteness ratings are widely used in NLP, yet a word's concreteness can shift with context, especially in figurative language such as metaphor, where common concrete nouns can take abstract interpretations. While such shifts are…