MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding

Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xurui Zhang, Smaranda Muresan, Nanyun Peng


Abstract
Generating metaphors is a challenging task as it requires a proper understanding of abstract concepts, making connections between unrelated concepts, and deviating from the literal meaning. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. Based on a theoretically-grounded connection between metaphors and symbols, we propose a method to automatically construct a parallel corpus by transforming a large number of metaphorical sentences from the Gutenberg Poetry corpus (CITATION) to their literal counterpart using recent advances in masked language modeling coupled with commonsense inference. For the generation task, we incorporate a metaphor discriminator to guide the decoding of a sequence to sequence model fine-tuned on our parallel data to generate high-quality metaphors. Human evaluation on an independent test set of literal statements shows that our best model generates metaphors better than three well-crafted baselines 66% of the time on average. A task-based evaluation shows that human-written poems enhanced with metaphors proposed by our model are preferred 68% of the time compared to poems without metaphors.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.336
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4250–4261
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.336
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.336
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xurui Zhang, Smaranda Muresan, and Nanyun Peng. 2021. MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4250–4261, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding (Chakrabarty et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.naacl-main.336.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2021.naacl-main.336.mp4
Code
 tuhinjubcse/MetaphorGenNAACL2021
Data
ConceptNet