The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion

Yucheng Li, Frank Guerin, Chenghua Lin


Abstract
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 conducts the first study in exploring how metaphors convey stronger emotion than their literal counterparts. We find that metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions. The more specific property of metaphor can be one of the reasons for metaphors’ superiority in emotion expression. When we compare metaphors with literal expressions with the same specificity level, the gap of emotion expressing ability between both reduces significantly. In addition, we observe specificity is crucial in literal language as well, as literal language can express stronger emotion by making it more specific.
Anthology ID:
2022.flp-1.6
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:
39–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.6
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.flp-1.6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yucheng Li, Frank Guerin, and Chenghua Lin. 2022. The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP), pages 39–43, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion (Li et al., Fig-Lang 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.6.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.6.mp4