FLUTE: Figurative Language Understanding through Textual Explanations

Tuhin Chakrabarty, Arkadiy Saakyan, Debanjan Ghosh, Smaranda Muresan


Abstract
Figurative language understanding has been recently framed as a recognizing textual entailment (RTE) task (a.k.a. natural language inference (NLI)). However, similar to classical RTE/NLI datasets they suffer from spurious correlations and annotation artifacts. To tackle this problem, work on NLI has built explanation-based datasets such as eSNLI, allowing us to probe whether language models are right for the right reasons. Yet no such data exists for figurative language, making it harder to assess genuine understanding of such expressions. To address this issue, we release FLUTE, a dataset of 9,000 figurative NLI instances with explanations, spanning four categories: Sarcasm, Simile, Metaphor, and Idioms. We collect the data through a Human-AI collaboration framework based on GPT-3, crowd workers, and expert annotators. We show how utilizing GPT-3 in conjunction with human annotators (novices and experts) can aid in scaling up the creation of datasets even for such complex linguistic phenomena as figurative language. The baseline performance of the T5 model fine-tuned on FLUTE shows that our dataset can bring us a step closer to developing models that understand figurative language through textual explanations.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.481
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7139–7159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.481
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.481
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tuhin Chakrabarty, Arkadiy Saakyan, Debanjan Ghosh, and Smaranda Muresan. 2022. FLUTE: Figurative Language Understanding through Textual Explanations. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7139–7159, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FLUTE: Figurative Language Understanding through Textual Explanations (Chakrabarty et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.481.pdf