ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech

Dawei Zhu, Qiusi Zhan, Zhejian Zhou, Yifan Song, Jiebin Zhang, Sujian Li


Abstract
Figures of speech, such as metaphor and irony, are ubiquitous in literature works and colloquial conversations. This poses great challenge for natural language understanding since figures of speech usually deviate from their ostensible meanings to express deeper semantic implications. Previous research lays emphasis on the literary aspect of figures and seldom provide a comprehensive exploration from a view of computational linguistics. In this paper, we first propose the concept of figurative unit, which is the carrier of a figure. Then we select 12 types of figures commonly used in Chinese, and build a Chinese corpus for Contextualized Figure Recognition (ConFiguRe). Different from previous token-level or sentence-level counterparts, ConFiguRe aims at extracting a figurative unit from discourse-level context, and classifying the figurative unit into the right figure type. On ConFiguRe, three tasks, i.e., figure extraction, figure type classification and figure recognition, are designed and the state-of-the-art techniques are utilized to implement the benchmarks. We conduct thorough experiments and show that all three tasks are challenging for existing models, thus requiring further research. Our dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/pku-tangent/ConFiguRe.
Anthology ID:
2022.coling-1.298
Volume:
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Chu-Ren Huang, Hansaem Kim, James Pustejovsky, Leo Wanner, Key-Sun Choi, Pum-Mo Ryu, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lucia Donatelli, Heng Ji, Sadao Kurohashi, Patrizia Paggio, Nianwen Xue, Seokhwan Kim, Younggyun Hahm, Zhong He, Tony Kyungil Lee, Enrico Santus, Francis Bond, Seung-Hoon Na
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3374–3385
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.coling-1.298
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dawei Zhu, Qiusi Zhan, Zhejian Zhou, Yifan Song, Jiebin Zhang, and Sujian Li. 2022. ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3374–3385, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech (Zhu et al., COLING 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2022.coling-1.298.pdf
Code
 pku-tangent/configure