Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

Neueste Paper

• Compound interpretation is based on analogy

  Tian Shen, Harald Baayen · 2. Oktober 2026

  How compound meanings are best predicted from constituent meanings remains a central question in computational models of lexical semantics. Comparing different computational models provides a way to evaluate alternative accounts of how semantic information is combined during compound comprehension. …

• PRISM: A Category-Theoretic Framework for Measuring and Refining Multimodal Analogies

  Mirella Zeisler, Ojas Shirekar, Mircea Lic\v{a}, Chirag Raman · 2. Oktober 2026

  Analogical reasoning involves identifying and preserving relational structures across domains. However, existing approaches to AI-driven multimodal analogy generation lack an interpretable measure of whether this structure is understood and maintained in the generated output. We address this gap wit…

• Presence Is Not Faithfulness: Figurative Vehicle Intrusion in Text-to-Image Generation

  Xiaoyu Ma, Chen Yang, Hao Chen · 29. September 2026

  Text-to-image (TTI) models increasingly generate high-quality images from natural-language prompts, yet figurative language exposes a failure: a vehicle that should guide the depiction of a tenor may instead be rendered as a visible object. We call this failure Figurative Vehicle Intrusion: the intr…

• AraMIP: Extending MIPVU Towards Metaphor Identification in Arabic

  Mandar Marathe, Manar Ali, Sara Nabhani, Raia Abu Ahmad, Ibrahim Baroud, Omar Momen · 16. September 2026

  Metaphor research has gained increasing attention due to its relevance to linguistic creativity, language use, cognitive processes, and related areas. While many efforts have been devoted to metaphor identification and annotation in English and other languages, Arabic remains under-resourced in this…

• Calibrated Ambiguity in Multimodal Language Models: Humans reach for cultural references, while models describe the picture

  Cody Kommers, Mingrui Ye, Evelyn Gius, Daniela Mihai, Hoyt Long, Zheng Yuan, Drew Hemment · 14. September 2026

  Ambiguity is often treated as a bug for AI systems to resolve---but in human communication and culture, ambiguity can also be a generative resource. From humour to politics to art, people express themselves in words and images that are open enough to invite different interpretations, yet constrained…

• To What Extent Do Large Language Models Understand Bangla Idioms?

  Mousumi Akter, Md. Faiyaz Abdullah Sayeedi, Nurul Labib Sayeedi, Swakkhar Shatabda · 4. September 2026

  Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of natural language, reflecting cultural nuances and posing unique challenges for computational models, particularly in low-resource languages. In this paper, we present the first large-scale benchmark dataset of Bangla idioms, complemented by a synthetic m…

• Blending Concepts: Benchmarking Visual Metaphor Generation in Text-to-Image Models

  Chuer Chen, Zichen Wang, Yi He, Zhengxi Yu, Nan Cao · 3. September 2026

  Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable success at faithfully rendering specified objects and attributes, yet their ability to produce visual metaphors, images that convey abstract ideas by combining elements from two distinct domains, remains largely unexamined. To bridge this gap, we i…

• Cross-Dataset Stability of Expert-Informed Skill Prompting and Fine-Tuning for Chinese Metaphor Identification

  Yufeng Wu, Meichun Liu · 27. August 2026

  Metaphor-identification performance can change markedly across datasets that differ in text distribution and annotation policy. We examine whether a fixed expert-informed procedure produces a more even cross-dataset profile than task-specific parameter adaptation. Four prespecified conditions are co…

• Words, Spaces and Generative AI: Layers of language in contemporary architecture

  Anca-Simona Horvath · 26. August 2026

  Language can be considered a design material in architecture, and in the context of text-to-X generative AI models becoming a common tool for architectural practice, looking more closely at language is more important now than in the past. After describing some of the important developments in lingui…

• Figurative Justice: Detecting metaphors in Hindi judgements with qualitative assessment and transformers

  Bhumika Bhattacharyya, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Indranil Dutta · 25. August 2026

  Metaphors are figurative use of words for conceptual mapping. Metaphor detection in the legal context has been crucial as metaphors are persuasive juridical means of creating legal meaning and concepts resulting in significant consequences. Metaphorical framing in legal discourse by judges, lawyers,…

• Figurative and Cultural Knowledge in LLMs: Investigating Cross-Domain Transfer through Fine-Tuning

  Mena Attia, Mona Diab, Thamar Solorio · 20. August 2026

  Figurative language is deeply culturally embedded; fluent use requires not just linguistic competence but cultural immersion. We ask whether LLMs can learn this link: does fine-tuning on cultural data improve figurative language understanding, and vice versa? We conduct a systematic study across fou…

• A Cognitively Motivated Multidimensional Framework for Evaluating Metaphor Explanations

  Ana Naveriani, Jakob Suchan, Stefano Zoia, Mehul Bhatt, Antonio Lieto, Gian Luca Pozzato · 18. August 2026

  Current evaluation of metaphor explanations relies mainly on holistic quality ratings, revealing little about how explanation quality is structured or where human judgments agree and diverge. We introduce a cognitively motivated framework that decomposes metaphor explanation quality into six theoret…

• Wisdom in Unity: The Role of Multilingual Training in Figurative Language Identification in Proverbs

  Rama Alomair, Remas Alsubaie, Walaa Saifalislam, Rima Alsonbul, Mona Alnajjar, Razan Aldossari, Haya Alibrahim, Abeer Aldayel · 11. August 2026

  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 transl…

• Can Language Models Imagine Without Seeing? Ekphrasis: Measuring Visual Creative Ideation in Text-Only LLMs

  Hongyu Luo, He Wang, Huihao Jing, Hong Ting Tsang, Yuxuan Liu, Wuganjing Song, Yauwai Yim, Chunyang Li, Yangqiu Song · 10. August 2026

  Current evaluations do not isolate whether text-only language models can originate visual concepts before image generation. Fluent visual prose can hide visual-plan failures: an answer may appear creative while repeating familiar visual clichés or failing to specify a renderable scene. We define Vis…

• Discovering Conceptual Metaphors Across Topics and Media Types

  Alexandria Leto, Rohan Das, Juan Vásquez, Abram Handler, Maria Leonor Pacheco · 10. August 2026

  Conceptual metaphors guide our thinking and actions by allowing us to reason about more abstract experiences (e.g., paying taxes) in terms of more concrete or embodied experiences (e.g., carrying a physical load) (Lakoff and Johnson, 2011). It follows that different conceptual metaphors can result i…

• M$^3$R-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Multimodal Metaphor Understanding

  Hong Jiang, Junnan Zhu, Jingwang Huang, Xiao Sun, Yuming Yang, Jiang Zhong, Ruirui Chen, Jingman Shi, Hao Wu, Nayu Liu, Xinyi Jiang, Kaiwen Wei · 7. August 2026

  Metaphor enables the understanding of abstract concepts through cross-domain mappings while conveying affective attitudes. In multimodal scenarios, visual and textual information jointly construct Target--Source mappings, requiring both conceptual understanding and cross-modal reasoning. However, ex…

• Towards End-to-End Multilingual Metaphor Processing: Integrating Detection, Translation, and Evaluation

  Jiahui Liang, Lifeng Han · 6. August 2026

  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 evaluat…

• VIVID: A Culturally Grounded Benchmark Exposing the Figurative Language Gap in Vietnamese NLP

  Tu Tran Do, Nhat Ngoc Nguyen, Khanh-Tung Tran, Hoang D. Nguyen, Tu Minh Phuong, Long Hoang Dang · 5. August 2026

  We present VIVID (Vietnamese Idioms for Validation and Interpretation Depth), the first systematic benchmark for evaluating culturally grounded figurative language understanding in Vietnamese. VIVID comprises 1,636 idioms and proverbs annotated with five complexity traits (literal expressions, pragm…

• Where did the ambiguity go? Examining how multimodal models interpret polysemous words

  Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Raja Marjieh, Thomas L. Griffiths · 4. August 2026

  Human language is highly polysemous. Many common words (e.g., 'bank' or 'palm') carry several distinct meanings that shape what humans communicate and imagine. Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to understand this multiplicity of meaning, but much less is known about how polysemy surfaces …

• Metaphor-Induced Algorithmic Steering: Cross-Domain Procedural Transfer in LLM Code Generation

  Zhibo Hu, Chen Wang, Yanfeng Shu, Hye-young Paik, Liming Dong, Liming Zhu · 3. August 2026

  Large language models benefit from elements in natural language, such as metaphors and analogies in training data and inference input to achieve generalisability across different domains. However, these language elements may also lead to unwanted behaviors when metaphorical expressions implicitly tr…

• Creative Transformation in Literary Texts: Modelling Change Across Representational Levels

  Ioana-Roxana Boriceanu, Liviu P. Dinu · 31. Juli 2026

  Creativity is often framed as the production of novelty, yet many cultural works emerge through transformation of earlier artifacts and not through isolated invention. Drawing on theories of imitation by Gabriel Tarde and James Mark Baldwin, this paper models creativity as selective transformation a…

• Metaphor Tracer: A Theory-Informed Analysis of Hidden States

  Marc Heimann, Roxana Assadi Moghaddam, Olga Brovkina, Mark Pettifor, Lutz Goetzmann · 31. Juli 2026

  What do a language model's hidden states say about the organization of a single text? From one forward pass, without training, we score every token position on two properties. The *aggregator* measures whether the position consolidates the whole text into a stable configuration. The *differentiator*…

• Reasoning or Memorization: Can LLMs Understand and Generate Chinese Xiehouyu Riddles?

  Hai Hu, Siyuan Song, Chongtian Shao, Kejia Zhang, Tianjian Zhu, Xiaojing Zhao · 28. Juli 2026

  In this paper, we push the boundary of LLM reasoning by testing them in a Chinese language game, xiehouyu, with novel xiehouyu created by linguists that had not existed before to avoid data contamination. We use multiple-choice questions (MCQ), free-form explanation generation, and new xiehouyu crea…

• CAMMAR: Culture-Aware Matryoshka for Metaphorical Arabic Representations

  Suzan Awinat, Alfonso Ortega del Puente · 20. Juli 2026

  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 "se…

• Cross-Cultural Value Attribution in Large Vision-Language Models

  Phillip Howard, Xin Su, Kathleen C. Fraser · 3. Juli 2026

  The rapid adoption of large vision-language models (LVLMs) in recent years has been accompanied by growing fairness concerns due to their propensity to reinforce harmful societal stereotypes. While significant attention has been paid to such fairness concerns in the context of social biases, relativ…