Interpreting Verbal Metaphors by Paraphrasing

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03391v1
• Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2021 21:00:23 GMT
• Title: Interpreting Verbal Metaphors by Paraphrasing
• Authors: Rui Mao, Chenghua Lin, Frank Guerin
• Abstract summary: We show that our paraphrasing method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline. We also demonstrate that our method can help a machine translation system improve its accuracy in translating English metaphors to 8 target languages.
• Score: 12.750941606061877
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Metaphorical expressions are difficult linguistic phenomena, challenging diverse Natural Language Processing tasks. Previous works showed that paraphrasing a metaphor as its literal counterpart can help machines better process metaphors on downstream tasks. In this paper, we interpret metaphors with BERT and WordNet hypernyms and synonyms in an unsupervised manner, showing that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline. We also demonstrate that our method can help a machine translation system improve its accuracy in translating English metaphors to 8 target languages.

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