Abstract
Figurative speech is an umbrella term for metaphor, irony, sarcasm, puns and some other speech genres and figures of speech. In research and competitions like SemEval, each of them is usually processed separately with a task-specific model. However, being altogether called “figurative speech”, they should share some property: “figurativeness”. If such a property exists, figurative speech can be processed simultaneously by one and the same algorithm. The present research compares performance of several NLP methods that were designed to detect one type of figurative speech (either metaphor, or irony, or puns) on short texts containing a combination of these types. The study shows that, despite being task-specific, state-of-the-art algorithms are able to process different types of figurative speech fairly well, and some of them are good even at cross-detection when the training set contains one type and the test set another.
The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project No. 18-37-00272.
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Notes
- 1.
Only sentences with metaphoricity index over 0.7.
- 2.
The full list of sources is available at https://github.com/evrog/FS_Datasets_AIST_2019.
- 3.
Hyperparameters for CNN: \(d=100, h_1=h_2=7, k_1=k_2=40\). Hyperparameters for RNN: \(d=50, n=20, \epsilon =0.1\). The scripts for NNs are available at https://github.com/evrog/Incongruity.
- 4.
A=accuracy.
- 5.
We do not know of any other systems that use Roget’s Thesaurus in detection of figurative speech.
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Mikhalkova, E., Ganzherli, N., Maraev, V., Glazkova, A., Grigoriev, D. (2019). A Comparison of Algorithms for Detection of “Figurativeness” in Metaphor, Irony and Puns. In: van der Aalst, W., et al. Analysis of Images, Social Networks and Texts. AIST 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11832. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37334-4_17
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