How Are Metaphors Processed by Language Models? The Case of Analogies

Joanne Boisson, Asahi Ushio, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Kiamehr Rezaee, Dimosthenis Antypas, Zara Siddique, Nina White, Jose Camacho-Collados


Abstract
The ability to compare by analogy, metaphorically or not, lies at the core of how humans understand the world and communicate. In this paper, we study the likelihood of metaphoric outputs, and the capability of a wide range of pretrained transformer-based language models to identify metaphors from other types of analogies, including anomalous ones. In particular, we are interested in discovering whether language models recognise metaphorical analogies equally well as other types of analogies, and whether the model size has an impact on this ability. The results show that there are relevant differences using perplexity as a proxy, with the larger models reducing the gap when it comes to analogical processing, and for distinguishing metaphors from incorrect analogies. This behaviour does not result in increased difficulties for larger generative models in identifying metaphors in comparison to other types of analogies from anomalous sentences in a zero-shot generation setting, when perplexity values of metaphoric and non-metaphoric analogies are similar.
Anthology ID:
2024.conll-1.28
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, FL, USA
Editors:
Libby Barak, Malihe Alikhani
Venue:
CoNLL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
365–387
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-1.28
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joanne Boisson, Asahi Ushio, Hsuvas Borkakoty, Kiamehr Rezaee, Dimosthenis Antypas, Zara Siddique, Nina White, and Jose Camacho-Collados. 2024. How Are Metaphors Processed by Language Models? The Case of Analogies. In Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 365–387, Miami, FL, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Are Metaphors Processed by Language Models? The Case of Analogies (Boisson et al., CoNLL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.conll-1.28.pdf