In this paper, we report on the shared task on metaphor identification on VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus and on a subset of the TOEFL Native Language Identification Corpus. The shared task was conducted as apart of the ACL 2020 Workshop on Processing Figurative Language.

This paper describes the ETS entry to the 2020 Metaphor Detection shared task. Our contribution consists of a sequence of experiments using BERT, starting with a baseline, strengthening it by spell-correcting the TOEFL corpus, followed by a multi-task learning setting, where one of the tasks is the token-level metaphor classification as per the shared task, while the other is meant to provide additional training that we hypothesized to be relevant to the main task. In one case, out-of-domain data manually annotated for metaphor is used for the auxiliary task; in the other case, in-domain data automatically annotated for idioms is used for the auxiliary task. Both multi-task experiments yield promising results.

We present a corpus of 240 argumentative essays written by non-native speakers of English annotated for metaphor. The corpus is made publicly available. We provide benchmark performance of state-of-the-art systems on this new corpus, and explore the relationship between writing proficiency and metaphor use.

As the community working on computational approaches to figurative language is growing and as methods and data become increasingly diverse, it is important to create widely shared empirical knowledge of the level of system performance in a range of contexts, thus facilitating progress in this area. One way of creating such shared knowledge is through benchmarking multiple systems on a common dataset. We report on the shared task on metaphor identification on the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus conducted at the NAACL 2018 Workshop on Figurative Language Processing.