Figuratively Speaking: Authorship Attribution via Multi-Task Figurative Language Modeling

Gregorios Katsios, Ning Sa, Tomek Strzalkowski


Abstract
The identification of Figurative Language (FL) features in text is crucial for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, where understanding of the author’s intended meaning and its nuances is key for successful communication. At the same time, the use of a specific blend of various FL forms most accurately reflects a writer’s style, rather than the use of any single construct, such as just metaphors or irony. Thus, we postulate that FL features could play an important role in Authorship Attribution (AA) tasks. We believe that our is the first computational study of AA based on FL use. Accordingly, we propose a Multi-task Figurative Language Model (MFLM) that learns to detect multiple FL features in text at once. We demonstrate, through detailed evaluation across multiple test sets, that the our model tends to perform equally or outperform specialized binary models in FL detection. Subsequently, we evaluate the predictive capability of joint FL features towards the AA task on three datasets, observing improved AA performance through the integration of MFLM embeddings.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.784
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13240–13255
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.784
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gregorios Katsios, Ning Sa, and Tomek Strzalkowski. 2024. Figuratively Speaking: Authorship Attribution via Multi-Task Figurative Language Modeling. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 13240–13255, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Figuratively Speaking: Authorship Attribution via Multi-Task Figurative Language Modeling (Katsios et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.784.pdf