It's not Rocket Science : Interpreting Figurative Language in Narratives
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 this paper, we study the interpretation of two non-compositional figurative languages (idioms and similes). We collected datasets of fictional narratives containing a figurative expression along with crowd-sourced plausible and implausible continuations relying on the correct interpretation of the expression. We then trained models to choose or generate the plausible continuation. Our experiments show that models based solely on pre-trained language models perform substantially worse than humans on these tasks. We additionally propose knowledge-enhanced models, adopting human strategies for interpreting figurative language types : inferring meaning from the context and relying on the constituent words' literal meanings. The knowledge-enhanced models improve the performance on both the discriminative and generative tasks, further bridging the gap from human performance.
Code (1)
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language
Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday c…
Testing the Ability of Language Models to Interpret Figurative Language
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 i…
Open-Ended Question AnsweringTesting the Ability of Language Models to Interpret Figurative Language
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 i…
Open-Ended Question AnsweringCan LLMs interpret figurative language as humans do?: surface-level vs representational similarity
Large language models generate judgments that resemble those of humans. Yet the extent to which these models align with human judgments in interpreting figurative and socially grounded language remains uncertain. To inve…
LMs stand their Ground: Investigating the Effect of Embodiment in Figurative Language Interpretation by Language Models
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 interpr…
Sentence