Metaphor analysis is a complex linguistic phenomenon shaped by context and external factors. While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate advanced capabilities in knowledge integration, contextual reasoning, and creative generation, their mechanisms for metaphor comprehension remain insufficiently explored. This study examines LLMs' metaphor-processing abilities from three perspectives: (1) Concept Mapping: using embedding space projections to evaluate how LLMs map concepts in target domains (e.g., misinterpreting "fall in love" as "drop down from love"); (2) Metaphor-Literal Repository: analyzing metaphorical words and their literal counterparts to identify inherent metaphorical knowledge; and (3) Syntactic Sensitivity: assessing how metaphorical syntactic structures influence LLMs' performance. Our findings reveal that LLMs generate 15\%-25\% conceptually irrelevant interpretations, depend on metaphorical indicators in training data rather than contextual cues, and are more sensitive to syntactic irregularities than to structural comprehension. These insights underline the limitations of LLMs in metaphor analysis and call for more robust computational approaches.

Metaphor is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that shapes scientific understanding, enabling the communication of complex concepts while potentially constraining paradigmatic thinking. Despite the prevalence of figurative language in scientific discourse, existing metaphor detection resources primarily focus on general-domain text, leaving a critical gap for domain-specific applications. In this paper, we present the Medical Metaphors Corpus (MCC), a comprehensive dataset of 792 annotated scientific conceptual metaphors spanning medical and biological domains. MCC aggregates metaphorical expressions from diverse sources including peer-reviewed literature, news media, social media discourse, and crowdsourced contributions, providing both binary and graded metaphoricity judgments validated through human annotation. Each instance includes source-target conceptual mappings and perceived metaphoricity scores on a 0-7 scale, establishing the first annotated resource for computational scientific metaphor research. Our evaluation demonstrates that state-of-the-art language models achieve modest performance on scientific metaphor detection, revealing substantial room for improvement in domain-specific figurative language understanding. MCC enables multiple research applications including metaphor detection benchmarking, quality-aware generation systems, and patient-centered communication tools.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are traditionally viewed as black-box algorithms, therefore reducing trustworthiness and obscuring potential approaches to increasing performance on downstream tasks. In this work, we apply an effective LLM decomposition method using a dictionary-learning approach with sparse autoencoders. This helps extract monosemantic features from polysemantic LLM neurons. Remarkably, our work identifies model-internal misunderstanding, allowing the automatic reformulation of the prompts with additional annotations to improve the interpretation by LLMs. Moreover, this approach demonstrates a significant performance improvement in downstream tasks, such as mathematical reasoning and metaphor detection.

Text-based hyperbole and metaphor detection are of great significance for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, due to their semantic obscurity and expressive diversity, it is rather challenging to identify them. Existing methods mostly focus on superficial text features, ignoring the associations of hyperbole and metaphor as well as the effect of implicit emotion on perceiving these rhetorical devices. To implement these hypotheses, we propose an emotion-guided hyperbole and metaphor detection framework based on bidirectional dynamic interaction (EmoBi). Firstly, the emotion analysis module deeply mines the emotion connotations behind hyperbole and metaphor. Next, the emotion-based domain mapping module identifies the target and source domains to gain a deeper understanding of the implicit meanings of hyperbole and metaphor. Finally, the bidirectional dynamic interaction module enables the mutual promotion between hyperbole and metaphor. Meanwhile, a verification mechanism is designed to ensure detection accuracy and reliability. Experiments show that EmoBi outperforms all baseline methods on four datasets. Specifically, compared to the current SoTA, the F1 score increased by 28.1% for hyperbole detection on the TroFi dataset and 23.1% for metaphor detection on the HYPO-L dataset. These results, underpinned by in-depth analyses, underscore the effectiveness and potential of our approach for advancing hyperbole and metaphor detection.

Recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated their capabilities across a variety of tasks. However, automatically extracting implicit knowledge from natural language remains a significant challenge, as machines lack active experience with the physical world. Given this scenario, semantic knowledge graphs can serve as conceptual spaces that guide the automated text generation reasoning process to achieve more efficient and explainable results. In this paper, we apply a logic-augmented generation (LAG) framework that leverages the explicit representation of a text through a semantic knowledge graph and applies it in combination with prompt heuristics to elicit implicit analogical connections. This method generates extended knowledge graph triples representing implicit meaning, enabling systems to reason on unlabeled multimodal data regardless of the domain. We validate our work through three metaphor detection and understanding tasks across four datasets, as they require deep analogical reasoning capabilities. The results show that this integrated approach surpasses current baselines, performs better than humans in understanding visual metaphors, and enables more explainable reasoning processes, though still has inherent limitations in metaphor understanding, especially for domain-specific metaphors. Furthermore, we propose a thorough error analysis, discussing issues with metaphorical annotations and current evaluation methods.

Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing (NLP). Previous research on automatic metaphor processing predominantly relies on training data consisting of English samples, which often reflect Western European or North American biases. This cultural skew can lead to an overestimation of model performance and contributions to NLP progress. However, the impact of cultural bias on metaphor processing, particularly in multimodal contexts, remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce MultiMM, a Multicultural Multimodal Metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English. MultiMM consists of 8,461 text-image advertisement pairs, each accompanied by fine-grained annotations, providing a deeper understanding of multimodal metaphors beyond a single cultural domain. Additionally, we propose Sentiment-Enriched Metaphor Detection (SEMD), a baseline model that integrates sentiment embeddings to enhance metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of SEMD on metaphor detection and sentiment analysis tasks. We hope this work increases awareness of cultural bias in NLP research and contributes to the development of fairer and more inclusive language models. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DUTIR-YSQ/MultiMM.

Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on social media. Grounded in qualitative social science research, we identify seven concepts evoked in immigration discourse (e.g. "water" or "vermin"). We propose and evaluate a novel technique that leverages both word-level and document-level signals to measure metaphor with respect to these concepts. We then study the relationship between metaphor, political ideology, and user engagement in 400K US tweets about immigration. While conservatives tend to use dehumanizing metaphors more than liberals, this effect varies widely across concepts. Moreover, creature-related metaphor is associated with more retweets, especially for liberal authors. Our work highlights the potential for computational methods to complement qualitative approaches in understanding subtle and implicit language in political discourse.

Metaphor detection, a critical task in natural language processing, involves identifying whether a particular word in a sentence is used metaphorically. Traditional approaches often rely on supervised learning models that implicitly encode semantic relationships based on metaphor theories. However, these methods often suffer from a lack of transparency in their decision-making processes, which undermines the reliability of their predictions. Recent research indicates that LLMs (large language models) exhibit significant potential in metaphor detection. Nevertheless, their reasoning capabilities are constrained by predefined knowledge graphs. To overcome these limitations, we propose DMD, a novel dual-perspective framework that harnesses both implicit and explicit applications of metaphor theories to guide LLMs in metaphor detection and adopts a self-judgment mechanism to validate the responses from the aforementioned forms of guidance. In comparison to previous methods, our framework offers more transparent reasoning processes and delivers more reliable predictions. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of DMD, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance across widely-used datasets.

Recently, utilizing large language models (LLMs) for metaphor detection has achieved promising results. However, these methods heavily rely on the capabilities of closed-source LLMs, which come with relatively high inference costs and latency. To address this, we propose a method for metaphor detection by fine-tuning open-source LLMs, effectively reducing inference costs and latency with a single inference step. Furthermore, metaphor detection suffers from a severe data scarcity problem, which hinders effective fine-tuning of LLMs. To tackle this, we introduce Curriculum-style Data Augmentation (CDA). Specifically, before fine-tuning, we evaluate the training data to identify correctly predicted instances for fine-tuning, while incorrectly predicted instances are used as seed data for data augmentation. This approach enables the model to quickly learn simpler knowledge and progressively acquire more complex knowledge, thereby improving performance incrementally. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all baselines. Additionally, we provide detailed ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of CDA.

Metaphors are common in everyday language, and the identification and understanding of metaphors are facilitated by models to achieve a better understanding of the text. Metaphors are mainly identified and generated by pre-trained models in existing research, but situations, where tenors or vehicles are not included in the metaphor, cannot be handled. The problem can be effectively solved by using Large Language Models (LLMs), but significant room for exploration remains in this early-stage research area. A multi-stage generative heuristic-enhanced prompt framework is proposed in this study to enhance the ability of LLMs to recognize tenors, vehicles, and grounds in Chinese metaphors. In the first stage, a small model is trained to obtain the required confidence score for answer candidate generation. In the second stage, questions are clustered and sampled according to specific rules. Finally, the heuristicenhanced prompt needed is formed by combining the generated answer candidates and demonstrations. The proposed model achieved 3rd place in Track 1 of Subtask 1, 1st place in Track 2 of Subtask 1, and 1st place in both tracks of Subtask 2 at the NLPCC-2024 Shared Task 9. Keywords: Chinese metaphor generation Multi-stage prompting Large language model DeBERTa.