Modeling Highlighting of Metaphors in Multitask Contrastive Learning Paradigms

Meghdut Sengupta, Milad Alshomary, Ingrid Scharlau, Henning Wachsmuth


Abstract
Metaphorical language, such as “spending time together”, projects meaning from a source domain (here, money) to a target domain (time). Thereby, it highlights certain aspects of the target domain, such as the effort behind the time investment. Highlighting aspects with metaphors (while hiding others) bridges the two domains and is the core of metaphorical meaning construction. For metaphor interpretation, linguistic theories stress that identifying the highlighted aspects is important for a better understanding of metaphors. However, metaphor research in NLP has not yet dealt with the phenomenon of highlighting. In this paper, we introduce the task of identifying the main aspect highlighted in a metaphorical sentence. Given the inherent interaction of source domains and highlighted aspects, we propose two multitask approaches - a joint learning approach and a continual learning approach - based on a finetuned contrastive learning model to jointly predict highlighted aspects and source domains. We further investigate whether (predicted) information about a source domain leads to better performance in predicting the highlighted aspects, and vice versa. Our experiments on an existing corpus suggest that, with the corresponding information, the performance to predict the other improves in terms of model accuracy in predicting highlighted aspects and source domains notably compared to the single-task baselines.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.308
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4636–4659
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.308
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.308
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Meghdut Sengupta, Milad Alshomary, Ingrid Scharlau, and Henning Wachsmuth. 2023. Modeling Highlighting of Metaphors in Multitask Contrastive Learning Paradigms. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 4636–4659, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Highlighting of Metaphors in Multitask Contrastive Learning Paradigms (Sengupta et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.308.pdf