Figurative Language Understanding

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Overview

This field studies how meaning changes when language is not meant literally, including metaphor, idiom, proverb, simile, and pun interpretation in text and images. Approaches range from contextual classifiers and span-level contrastive learning to linguistically guided annotation, semantic retrieval, knowledge graphs, and multimodal reasoning benchmarks. Recent work tests these methods across languages, cultures, conversational settings, and tasks such as detection, translation, explanation, and image grounding. Models can perform well on familiar patterns yet still favor literal readings, miss cultural cues, or give explanations unsupported by the input, especially for low-resource languages and multimodal content.

Latest papers

CardsList

45 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens

    Apr 20, 2026Saptarshi Ghosh, Tianyu JiangFigurative Language UnderstandingLLM Interpretability

    University of Cincinnati

  2. More Than Meets the Eye: Measuring the Semiotic Gap in Vision-Language Models via Semantic Anchorage

    Apr 19, 2026Wei HeVLM EvaluationFigurative Language Understanding

    IDSAI, University of Exeter Exeter, UK

  3. Learning the Cue or Learning the Word? Analyzing Generalization in Metaphor Detection for Verbs

    Apr 15, 2026Sinan Kurtyigit, Sabine Schulte im Walde, Alexander FraserFigurative Language UnderstandingMemorization in Language Models

    School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich · Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart

  4. MetFuse: Figurative Fusion between Metonymy and Metaphor

    Apr 14, 2026Saptarshi Ghosh, Tianyu JiangFigurative Language Understanding

    University of Cincinnati

  5. When Meaning Isn't Literal: Exploring Idiomatic Meaning Across Languages and Modalities

    Apr 12, 2026Sarmistha Das, Shreyas Guha, Suvrayan Bandyopadhyay +3Retrieval-Augmented ReasoningFigurative Language Understanding

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, India · School of Information Technology, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand

  6. Computational Implementation of a Model of Category-Theoretic Metaphor Comprehension

    Apr 11, 2026Fumitaka Iwaki, Miho Fuyama, Hayato Saigo +1Figurative Language UnderstandingComputational Cognitive Modeling

    School of Science and Technology, Tokyo Denki University · College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University · ZEN University

  7. Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb-Object Constructions

    Apr 9, 2026Prisca Piccirilli, Alexander Fraser, Sabine Schulte im WaldeCorpus LinguisticsFigurative Language Understanding

    Institute for Natural Language Processing (IMS), University of Stuttgart, Germany · Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Germany

  8. Contextualising (Im)plausible Events Triggers Figurative Language

    Apr 9, 2026Annerose Eichel, Tonmoy Rakshit, Sabine Schulte im WaldeFigurative Language UnderstandingPragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

    Institute for Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart

  9. I Came, I Saw, I Explained: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Figurative Meaning in Memes

    Mar 24, 2026Shijia Zhou, Saif M. Mohammad, Barbara Plank +1Figurative Language UnderstandingMultimodal Large Language Models

    MaiNLP, Center for Information and Language Processing, LMU Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML), Munich, Germany · National Research Council Canada, Ottawa, Canada

  10. Span Modeling for Idiomaticity and Figurative Language Detection with Span Contrastive Loss

    Mar 24, 2026Blake Matheny, Phuong Minh Nguyen, Minh Le NguyenFigurative Language UnderstandingContrastive Learning

    Information Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, Japan.

  11. Interpretable Chinese Metaphor Identification via LLM-Assisted MIPVU Rule Script Generation: A Comparative Protocol Study

    Mar 11, 2026Weihang Huang, Mengna LiuFigurative Language UnderstandingInterpretable ML

    University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK · Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Guangzhou, China

  12. PolyFrame at MWE-2026 AdMIRe 2: When Words Are Not Enough: Multimodal Idiom Disambiguation

    Feb 20, 2026Nina Hosseini-KivananiFigurative Language UnderstandingMultimodal Understanding

    University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg · Radio Télévision Luxembourg (RTL), Luxembourg

  13. When Semantic Overlap Is Not Enough: Cross-Lingual Euphemism Transfer Between Turkish and English

    Feb 18, 2026Hasan Can Biyik, Libby Barak, Jing Peng +1Cross-Lingual TransferFigurative Language Understanding

    Montclair State University

  14. MasalBench: A Benchmark for Contextual and Cross-Cultural Understanding of Persian Proverbs in LLMs

    Jan 29, 2026Ghazal Kalhor, Behnam BahrakCross-Cultural Language Model EvaluationFigurative Language Understanding

    School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran · Tehran Institute for Advanced Studies, Khatam University, Tehran, Iran

  15. Representational Similarity Alignment of Figurative Language in Humans and Large Language Models

    Jan 14, 2026Samhita Bollepally, Aurora Sloman-Moll, Takashi Yamauchi +1Figurative Language UnderstandingLLM Evaluation