Related papers: What Drives the Use of Metaphorical Language? Nega…

Research on metaphorical language has shown ties between abstractness and emotionality with regard to metaphoricity; prior work is however limited to the word and sentence levels, and up to date there is no empirical study establishing the…

Metaphor pervades everyday language, allowing speakers to express abstract concepts via concrete domains. While prior work has studied metaphors cognitively and psycholinguistically, large-scale comparisons with literal language remain…

Metaphors are widely used in political rhetoric as an effective framing device. While the efficacy of specific metaphors such as the war metaphor in political discourse has been documented before, those studies often rely on small number of…

Metaphors are proven to have stronger emotional impact than literal expressions. Although this conclusion is shown to be promising in benefiting various NLP applications, the reasons behind this phenomenon are not well studied. This paper…

Metaphor analysis is a complex linguistic phenomenon shaped by context and external factors. While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced capabilities in knowledge integration, contextual reasoning, and creative generation, their…

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,…

While NLP models often seek to capture cognitive states via language, the validity of predicted states is determined by comparing them to annotations created without access the cognitive states of the authors. In behavioral sciences,…

This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in metaphor interpretation across multiple datasets, tasks, and prompt configurations. Although metaphor processing has gained significant…

While contextualized word representations have improved state-of-the-art benchmarks in many NLP tasks, their potential usefulness for social-oriented tasks remains largely unexplored. We show how contextualized word embeddings can be used…

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…

Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of…

Most current approaches to metaphor identification use restricted linguistic contexts, e.g. by considering only a verb's arguments or the sentence containing a phrase. Inspired by pragmatic accounts of metaphor, we argue that broader…

While large language models have shown exciting progress on several NLP benchmarks, evaluating their ability for complex analogical reasoning remains under-explored. Here, we introduce a high-quality crowdsourced dataset of narratives for…

Human languages are full of metaphorical expressions. Metaphors help people understand the world by connecting new concepts and domains to more familiar ones. Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are therefore assumed to encode…

Natural Language Processing prides itself to be an empirically-minded, if not outright empiricist field, and yet lately it seems to get itself into essentialist debates on issues of meaning and measurement ("Do Large Language Models…

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…

Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…

There are several linguistic claims about situations where words are more likely to be used as metaphors. However, few studies have sought to verify such claims with large corpora. This study entails a large-scale, corpus-based analysis of…

The human language system represents both linguistic forms and meanings, but the abstractness of the meaning representations remains debated. Here, we searched for abstract representations of meaning in the language cortex by modeling…

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…