Just-DREAM-about-it: Figurative Language Understanding with DREAM-FLUTE

Yuling Gu, Yao Fu, Valentina Pyatkin, Ian Magnusson, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Peter Clark


Abstract
Figurative language (e.g., “he flew like the wind”) is challenging to understand, as it is hard to tell what implicit information is being conveyed from the surface form alone. We hypothesize that to perform this task well, the reader needs to mentally elaborate the scene being described to identify a sensible meaning of the language. We present DREAM-FLUTE, a figurative language understanding system that does this, first forming a “mental model” of situations described in a premise and hypothesis before making an entailment/contradiction decision and generating an explanation. DREAM-FLUTE uses an existing scene elaboration model, DREAM, for constructing its “mental model.” In the FigLang2022 Shared Task evaluation, DREAM-FLUTE achieved (joint) first place (Acc@60=63.3%), and can perform even better with ensemble techniques, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach. More generally, this work suggests that adding a reflective component to pretrained language models can improve their performance beyond standard fine-tuning (3.3% improvement in Acc@60).
Anthology ID:
2022.flp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Debanjan Ghosh, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Soujanya Poria, Tuhin Chakrabarty
Venue:
Fig-Lang
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
84–93
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.12
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.flp-1.12
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuling Gu, Yao Fu, Valentina Pyatkin, Ian Magnusson, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, and Peter Clark. 2022. Just-DREAM-about-it: Figurative Language Understanding with DREAM-FLUTE. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP), pages 84–93, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Just-DREAM-about-it: Figurative Language Understanding with DREAM-FLUTE (Gu et al., Fig-Lang 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.12.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.12.mp4