Do Large Language Models Grasp Metaphors? (OFAI Lecture by Dagmar Gromann)
Channel: Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
Date: 2023-11-23

Do Large Language Models Grasp Metaphors?
Assoz. Prof. Mag. Dr. Dagmar Gromann, BSc, University of Vienna
22 November 2023

Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures from a source to a target domain, e.g. WORDS ARE WEAPONS as in "Your words pierce my heart". Prior neural approaches focus primarily on detecting whether natural language sequences are metaphoric or literal. In this talk, I will present work on probing metaphoric knowledge in pre-trained language models. The focus is on testing their capability to predict source domains given an input sentence and a target domain in English and Spanish. Several methods from fine-tuning to few-shot prompting are tested. Results show that the most common error type is the hallucination of source domains.