Does the “Most Sinfully Decadent Cake Ever” Taste Good? Answering Yes/No Questions from Figurative Contexts

Geetanjali Rakshit, Jeffrey Flanigan


Abstract
Figurative language is commonplace in natural language, and while making communication memorable and creative, can be difficult to understand. In this work, we investigate the robustness of Question Answering (QA) models on figurative text. Yes/no questions, in particular, are a useful probe of figurative language understanding capabilities of large language models. We propose FigurativeQA, a set of 1000 yes/no questions with figurative and non-figurative contexts, extracted from the domains of restaurant and product reviews. We show that state-of-the-art BERT-based QA models exhibit an average performance drop of up to 15% points when answering questions from figurative contexts, as compared to non-figurative ones. While models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT are better at handling figurative texts, we show that further performance gains can be achieved by automatically simplifying the figurative contexts into their non-figurative (literal) counterparts. We find that the best overall model is ChatGPT with chain-of-thought prompting to generate non-figurative contexts. Our work provides a promising direction for building more robust QA models with figurative language understanding capabilities.
Anthology ID:
2023.ranlp-1.100
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Ruslan Mitkov, Galia Angelova
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
926–936
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.100
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Geetanjali Rakshit and Jeffrey Flanigan. 2023. Does the “Most Sinfully Decadent Cake Ever” Taste Good? Answering Yes/No Questions from Figurative Contexts. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 926–936, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Does the “Most Sinfully Decadent Cake Ever” Taste Good? Answering Yes/No Questions from Figurative Contexts (Rakshit & Flanigan, RANLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.ranlp-1.100.pdf