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On the Cusp of Comprehensibility: Can Language Models Distinguish Between Metaphors and Nonsense?

Bernadeta Griciūtė, Marc Tanti, Lucia Donatelli


Abstract
Utterly creative texts can sometimes be difficult to understand, balancing on the edge of comprehensibility. However, good language skills and common sense allow advanced language users both to interpret creative texts and to reject some linguistic input as nonsense. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether the current language models are also able to make the distinction between a creative language use and nonsense. To test this, we have computed mean rank and pseudo-log-likelihood score (PLL) of metaphorical and nonsensical sentences, and fine-tuned several pretrained models (BERT, RoBERTa) for binary classification between the two categories. There was a significant difference in the mean ranks and PPL scores of the categories, and the classifier reached around 85.5% accuracy. The results raise further questions on what could have let to such satisfactory performance.
Anthology ID:
2022.flp-1.25
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Debanjan Ghosh, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Soujanya Poria, Tuhin Chakrabarty
Venue:
Fig-Lang
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
173–177
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.25
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.flp-1.25
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bernadeta Griciūtė, Marc Tanti, and Lucia Donatelli. 2022. On the Cusp of Comprehensibility: Can Language Models Distinguish Between Metaphors and Nonsense?. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP), pages 173–177, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Cusp of Comprehensibility: Can Language Models Distinguish Between Metaphors and Nonsense? (Griciūtė et al., Fig-Lang 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.25.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.25.mp4