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.

In the era of widespread dissemination through social media, the task of rumor detection plays a pivotal role in establishing a trustworthy and reliable information environment. Nonetheless, existing research on rumor detection confronts several challenges: the limited expressive power of text encoding sequences, difficulties in domain knowledge coverage and effective information extraction with knowledge graph-based methods, and insufficient mining of semantic structural information. To address these issues, we propose a Crowd Intelligence and ChatGPT-Assisted Network(CICAN) for rumor classification. Specifically, we present a crowd intelligence-based semantic feature learning module to capture textual content’s sequential and hierarchical features. Then, we design a knowledge-based semantic structural mining module that leverages ChatGPT for knowledge enhancement. Finally, we construct an entity-sentence heterogeneous graph and design Entity-Aware Heterogeneous Attention to effectively integrate diverse structural information meta-paths. Experimental results demonstrate that CICAN achieves performance improvement in rumor detection tasks, validating the effectiveness and rationality of using large language models as auxiliary tools.