AraMIP: Extending MIPVU Towards Metaphor Identification in Arabic

Metaphor in Arabic is a culturally grounded mechanism for constructing meaning, encoding cultural knowledge that shapes interpretation. Yet current Arabic language models typically collapse lexical, cultural, and metaphorical information into a single representational space, a phenomenon we term "semantic smearing". We introduce CAMMAR (Culture-Aware Matryoshka for Metaphorical Arabic Representations), a representation learning framework that organizes meaning into nested lexical, cultural, and metaphorical embedding subspaces through a staged semantic curriculum. The design implements compositional principles of Al-Jurjani's theory of nazum, modeling figurative meaning as compositionally grounded in prior semantic relations, and yields a training-free geometric measure of metaphoricity based on the distance between lexical and metaphorical representations. Evaluated on a new span-annotated Arabic metaphor set as word-matched figurative/literal pairs, the geometric readout detects metaphor well above chance when the inter-layer geometry is shaped by paired supervision (AUC up to 0.84; figurative outscores its literal counterpart for the same word in 82.6% of pairs), but sits at chance under an unsupervised domain contrast alone, a clean separation between a legible-under-supervision regime and a non-emergent one. A controlled ablation shows that grounding the lexical layer in morphological roots gives a small but consistent gain, an effect absent from direct probing that reflects the layer's quality as a measurement anchor. We will release the datasets, cultural concept inventory, and code upon acceptance.

Although multilingual approaches to figurative language identification are not new, the shift beyond language-homogeneous training data requires a clearer understanding of the contribution of translated multilingual supervision. We examine this question using 742 proverb concepts across 6,787 translated instances for seven languages. We evaluate five models including multilingual encoders and instruction-tuned LLMs through progressively increasing levels of multilingual supervision. Moreover, we introduce multidimensional annotation framework for proverbs that characterizes proverbs through four complementary figurative forms: Metaphorical, Moral/Advisory, Cause-Effect, and Culture-Specific. Our findings show that overall, adding multilingual training data beyond 50% provides only limited additional improvement, although the best supervision level varies across models and languages. Also, we show that combining diverse figurative forms yields the strongest overall performance. A notable finding is that the least frequent figurative form culture-specific exhibits the largest performance gains under multilingual supervision. Furthermore, the moral/advisory and culture-specific forms of proverb contribute more to instruct tuning LLM overall figurative identification performance. These findings motivate multilingual figurative identification to move beyond metaphor-centric taxonomies toward concept-level multidimensional frameworks that explicitly model complementary forms of figurative meanings that are context representative.

Metaphorical language remains a major challenge for multilingual natural language processing because successful interpretation and translation require reasoning beyond literal lexical meaning. Existing research has largely investigated metaphor detection, machine translation, and translation evaluation as separate tasks, while little work has explored how these components can be integrated into a unified computational framework. This PhD proposal aims to develop an end-to-end framework for multilingual metaphor processing consisting of three complementary research directions: (1) robust metaphor detection across languages, (2) metaphor-oriented translation evaluation for both human assessment and automatic quality estimation, and (3) joint modelling that connects metaphor detection with translation evaluation. The proposed research will combine linguistic theory with recent advances in large language models to develop new datasets, annotation methodologies, evaluation benchmarks, and automatic evaluation approaches for metaphor-aware machine translation. The expected outcome is a unified framework that improves both the development and evaluation of multilingual NLP systems when processing figurative language.