A Theory Guided Scaffolding Instruction Framework for LLM-Enabled Metaphor Reasoning

Yuan Tian, Nan Xu, Wenji Mao


Abstract
Metaphor detection is a challenging task in figurative language processing, which aims to distinguish between metaphorical and literal expressions in text. Existing methods tackle metaphor detection via training or fine-tuning discriminative models on labeled data. However, these approaches struggle to explain the underlying reasoning process behind the metaphorical/literal judgment. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in language reasoning tasks. Although promising, LLM-based methods for metaphor detection and reasoning are still faced with the challenging issue of bringing the explainable concepts for metaphor reasoning and their linguistic manifestation. To fill this gap, we propose a novel Theory guided Scaffolding Instruction (TSI) framework that instructs an LLM to infer the underlying reasoning process of metaphor detection guided by metaphor theories for the first time. Our work is inspired by a pedagogical strategy called scaffolding instruction, which encourages educators to provide questioning and support as scaffolding so as to assist learners in constructing the understanding of pedagogical goals step by step. We first construct a metaphor knowledge graph grounded in metaphor theory which serves as the instructional structure to obtain a series of scaffolding questions, directing the LLM to incrementally generate the reasoning process for metaphor understanding through dialogue interactions. During this theory guided instruction process, we explore the LLM’s mastery boundary and provide the relevant knowledge as scaffolding support when the question is beyond the LLM’s capability. Experimental results verify that our method significantly outperforms both the LLM-based reasoning methods and the SOTA methods in metaphor detection, indicating the facilitation of metaphor and instruction theories in guiding LLM-based reasoning process.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.428
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7731–7748
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.428
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Yuan Tian, Nan Xu, and Wenji Mao. 2024. A Theory Guided Scaffolding Instruction Framework for LLM-Enabled Metaphor Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7731–7748, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Theory Guided Scaffolding Instruction Framework for LLM-Enabled Metaphor Reasoning (Tian et al., NAACL 2024)
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