Sequential verb metaphor detection with linguistic theories

Abstract

Metaphor plays an indispensable role in human life. Although sequence tagging models took advantage of linguistic theories of metaphor identification, the usage of metaphor in common words is not considered, when choosing the literal meaning of the target verbs. We present a novel approach to express the literal meaning subtly, combining the common usage and the inherent visualizability properties of words, termed GloVe embedding and visual embedding. Meanwhile, we import position information of the target verbs to gain the contextual meaning more accurately. Both two DNN models use these embeddings as inputs in this paper, which are inspired by two human metaphor identification procedures augmented with contextualized word representations (ELMo embedding). By testing on two public datasets, the results show improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also verify the universality of the approach by testing the examples that the target words were adjectives, adverbs, and nouns, and the results show the approach is applicable to the above three parts of speech.