Consistency Rating of Semantic Transparency: an Evaluation Method for Metaphor Competence in Idiom Understanding Tasks

Hui Gao, Jing Zhang, Peng Zhang, Chang Yang


Abstract
Idioms condense complex semantics into fixed phrases, and their meaning is often not directly connected to the literal meaning of their constituent words, making idiom comprehension a test of metaphor competence. Metaphor, as a cognitive process in human beings, has not yet found an effective evaluation method to assess the metaphor competence of LLMs (Large Language Models). In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the metaphor competence of LLMs for the idiom understanding task: the Consistency Rating of Semantic Transparency (CR-ST). This strategy assesses the difficulty of understanding idioms through two dimensions: overall semantic transparency and constituent semantic transparency, aiming to gauge LLMs’ mastery of metaphor competence. Subsequently, we introduce a prompt mechanism-Paraphrase Augmentation Strategy with Self-checking (PASS), based on human language logic, which guides the model to enhance its metaphor competence by explicitly generating idiom paraphrases. We conducted a baseline evaluation of seven LLMs on the CINLID and ChID datasets and analyzed the effectiveness of PASS on different subsets of semantic transparency. The experimental results demonstrate that LLMs can achieve performance comparable to PLMs (Pre-trained Language Models) without additional training, and PASS has a positive effect on the metaphor competence of LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.697
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10460–10471
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.697/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hui Gao, Jing Zhang, Peng Zhang, and Chang Yang. 2025. Consistency Rating of Semantic Transparency: an Evaluation Method for Metaphor Competence in Idiom Understanding Tasks. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 10460–10471, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Consistency Rating of Semantic Transparency: an Evaluation Method for Metaphor Competence in Idiom Understanding Tasks (Gao et al., COLING 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.697.pdf