Related papers: LMs stand their Ground: Investigating the Effect o…
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…
Despite significant progress in multimodal language models (LMs), it remains unclear whether visual grounding enhances their understanding of embodied knowledge compared to text-only models. To address this question, we propose a novel…
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…
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…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
Despite the ubiquity of large language models (LLMs) in AI research, the question of embodiment in LLMs remains underexplored, distinguishing them from embodied systems in robotics where sensory perception directly informs physical action.…
State-of-the-art approaches for metaphor detection compare their literal - or core - meaning and their contextual meaning using metaphor classifiers based on neural networks. However, metaphorical expressions evolve over time due to various…
Humans' experience of the world is profoundly multimodal from the beginning, so why do existing state-of-the-art language models only use text as a modality to learn and represent semantic meaning? In this paper we review the literature on…
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…
This document chronicles this author's attempt to explore how words come to mean what they do, with a particular focus on child language acquisition and what that means for models of language understanding.\footnote{I say \emph{historical}…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world communication settings, yet their ability to resolve context-dependent ambiguity remains underexplored. In this work, we present EMODIS, a new benchmark for evaluating…
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…
Embodied language comprehension emphasizes that language understanding is not solely a matter of mental processing in the brain but also involves interactions with the physical and social environment. With the explosive growth of Large…
One of the central aspects of contextualised language models is that they should be able to distinguish the meaning of lexically ambiguous words by their contexts. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the contextualised…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
We present a comprehensive evaluation of the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process culturally grounded language, specifically to understand and pragmatically use figurative expressions that encode local knowledge and cultural…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary progress in bridging textual and visual inputs. However, MLLMs still face challenges in situated physical and social interactions in sensorally rich, multimodal and…
We explore the ability of word embeddings to capture both semantic and morphological similarity, as affected by the different types of linguistic properties (surface form, lemma, morphological tag) used to compose the representation of each…
While large language models (LMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across numerous tasks, they often struggle with simple reasoning and planning in physical environments, such as understanding object permanence or planning household…
Subjective language understanding refers to a broad set of natural language processing tasks where the goal is to interpret or generate content that conveys personal feelings, opinions, or figurative meanings rather than objective facts.…