Despite the ubiquity of large language models (LLMs) in AI research, the question of embodiment in LLMs remains underexplored, distinguishing them from embodied systems in robotics where sensory perception directly informs physical action.Our investigation navigates the intriguing terrain of whether LLMs, despite their non-embodied nature, effectively capture implicit human intuitions about fundamental, spatial building blocks of language. We employ insights from spatial cognitive foundations developed through early sensorimotor experiences, guiding our exploration through the reproduction of three psycholinguistic experiments. Surprisingly, correlations between model outputs and human responses emerge, revealing adaptability without a tangible connection to embodied experiences. Notable distinctions include polarized language model responses and reduced correlations in vision language models. This research contributes to a nuanced understanding of the interplay between language, spatial experiences, and the computations made by large language models.Project Website: https://cisnlp.github.io/Spatial_Schemas/

Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures from a source to a target domain. Prior neural approaches focus on detecting whether natural language sequences are metaphoric or literal. We believe that to truly probe metaphoric knowledge in pre-trained language models, their capability to detect this transfer should be investigated. To this end, this paper proposes to probe the ability of GPT-3 to detect metaphoric language and predict the metaphor’s source domain without any pre-set domains. We experiment with different training sample configurations for fine-tuning and few-shot prompting on two distinct datasets. When provided 12 few-shot samples in the prompt, GPT-3 generates the correct source domain for a new sample with an accuracy of 65.15% in English and 34.65% in Spanish. GPT’s most common error is a hallucinated source domain for which no indicator is present in the sentence. Other common errors include identifying a sequence as literal even though a metaphor is present and predicting the wrong source domain based on specific words in the sequence that are not metaphorically related to the target domain.

In embodied cognition, physical experiences are believed to shape abstract cognition, such as natural language and reasoning. Image schemas were introduced as spatio-temporal cognitive building blocks that capture these recurring sensorimotor experiences. The few existing approaches for automatic detection of image schemas in natural language rely on specific assumptions about word classes as indicators of spatio-temporal events. Furthermore, the lack of sufficiently large, annotated datasets makes evaluation and supervised learning difficult. We propose to build on the recent success of large multilingual pretrained language models and a small dataset of examples from image schema literature to train a supervised classifier that classifies natural language expressions of varying lengths into image schemas. Despite most of the training data being in English with few examples for German, the model performs best in German. Additionally, we analyse the model’s zero-shot performance in Russian, French, and Mandarin. To further investigate the model’s behaviour, we utilize local linear approximations for prediction probabilities that indicate which words in a sentence the model relies on for its final classification decision. Code and dataset are publicly available.

Conceptual metaphors represent a cognitive mechanism to transfer knowledge structures from one onto another domain. Image-schematic conceptual metaphors (ISCMs) specialize on transferring sensorimotor experiences to abstract domains. Natural language is believed to provide evidence of such metaphors. However, approaches to verify this hypothesis largely rely on top-down methods, gathering examples by way of introspection, or on manual corpus analyses. In order to contribute towards a method that is systematic and can be replicated, we propose to bring together existing processing steps in a pipeline to detect ISCMs, exemplified for the image schema SUPPORT in the COVID-19 domain. This pipeline consist of neural metaphor detection, dependency parsing to uncover construction patterns, clustering, and BERT-based frame annotation of dependent constructions to analyse ISCMs.

We describe our submission to the CogALex-VI shared task on the identification of multilingual paradigmatic relations building on XLM-RoBERTa (XLM-R), a robustly optimized and multilingual BERT model. In spite of several experiments with data augmentation, data addition and ensemble methods with a Siamese Triple Net, Translrelation, the XLM-R model with a linear classifier adapted to this specific task, performed best in testing and achieved the best results in the final evaluation of the shared task, even for a previously unseen language.