Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs

Xiaoyu Tong, Rochelle Choenni, Martha Lewis, Ekaterina Shutova


Abstract
Metaphors in natural language are a reflection of fundamental cognitive processes such as analogical reasoning and categorisation, and are deeply rooted in everyday communication. Metaphor understanding is therefore an essential task for large language models (LLMs). We release the Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset (MUNCH), designed to evaluate the metaphor understanding capabilities of LLMs. The dataset provides over 10k paraphrases for sentences containing metaphor use, as well as 1.5k instances containing inapt paraphrases. The inapt paraphrases were carefully selected to serve as control to determine whether the model indeed performs full metaphor interpretation or rather resorts to lexical similarity. All apt and inapt paraphrases were manually annotated. The metaphorical sentences cover natural metaphor uses across 4 genres (academic, news, fiction, and conversation), and they exhibit different levels of novelty. Experiments with LLaMA and GPT-3.5 demonstrate that MUNCH presents a challenging task for LLMs. The dataset is freely accessible at https://github.com/xiaoyuisrain/metaphor-understanding-challenge.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.193
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3517–3536
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.193
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.193
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoyu Tong, Rochelle Choenni, Martha Lewis, and Ekaterina Shutova. 2024. Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3517–3536, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs (Tong et al., ACL 2024)
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