Metaphors use words from one domain of knowledge to describe another, which can make the meaning less clear and require human interpretation to understand. This makes it difficult for automated models to detect metaphorical usage. The objective of the experiments in the paper is to enhance the ability of deep learning models to detect metaphors automatically. This is achieved by using two elements of semantic richness, sensory experience, and body-object interaction, as the main lexical features, combined with the contextual information present in the metaphorical sentences. The tests were conducted using classification and sequence labeling models for metaphor detection on the three metaphorical corpora VUAMC, MOH-X, and TroFi. The sensory experience led to significant improvements in the classification and sequence labelling models across all datasets. The highest gains were seen on the VUAMC dataset: recall increased by 20.9%, F1 by 7.5% for the classification model, and Recall increased by 11.66% and F1 by 3.69% for the sequence labelling model. Body-object interaction also showed positive impact on the three datasets.

The idea that a shift in concreteness within a sentence indicates the presence of a metaphor has been around for a while. However, recent methods of detecting metaphor that have relied on deep neural models have ignored concreteness and related psycholinguistic information. We hypothesis that this information is not available to these models and that their addition will boost the performance of these models in detecting metaphor. We test this hypothesis on the Metaphor Detection Shared Task 2020 and find that the addition of concreteness information does in fact boost deep neural models. We also run tests on data from a previous shared task and show similar results.