Modeling Conceptual Attribute Likeness and Domain Inconsistency for Metaphor Detection

Yuan Tian, Nan Xu, Wenji Mao, Daniel Zeng


Abstract
Metaphor detection is an important and challenging task in natural language processing, which aims to distinguish between metaphorical and literal expressions in text. Previous studies mainly leverage the incongruity of source and target domains and contextual clues for detection, neglecting similar attributes shared between source and target concepts in metaphorical expressions. Based on conceptual metaphor theory, these similar attributes are essential to infer implicit meanings conveyed by the metaphor. Under the guidance of conceptual metaphor theory, in this paper, we model the likeness of attribute for the first time and propose a novel Attribute Likeness and Domain Inconsistency Learning framework (AIDIL) for word-pair metaphor detection. Specifically, we propose an attribute siamese network to mine similar attributes between source and target concepts. We then devise a domain contrastive learning strategy to learn the semantic inconsistency of concepts in source and target domains. Extensive experiments on four datasets verify that our method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods, and demonstrate the generalization ability of our method.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.480
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7736–7752
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.480
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.480
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuan Tian, Nan Xu, Wenji Mao, and Daniel Zeng. 2023. Modeling Conceptual Attribute Likeness and Domain Inconsistency for Metaphor Detection. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7736–7752, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Conceptual Attribute Likeness and Domain Inconsistency for Metaphor Detection (Tian et al., EMNLP 2023)
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