Challenges in Finding Metaphorical Connections

Abstract

Poetry is known for its novel expression using figurative language. We introduce a writing task that contains the essential challenges of generating meaningful figurative language and can be evaluated. We investigate how to find metaphorical connections between abstract themes and concrete domains by asking people to write four-line poems on a given metaphor, such as "death is a rose" or "anger is wood". We find that only 24% of poems successfully make a metaphorical connection. We present five alternate ways people respond to the prompt and release our dataset of 186 categorized poems. We suggest opportunities for computational approaches.

“Love Is as Complex as Math”: Metaphor Generation System for Social Chatbot

“…Therefore, to select suitable targets and sources, we applied two different approaches in our system. To select targets, we first followed previous linguistic studies and collected 122 poetic themes [2,4]. Please note that poetic themes are usually abstract concepts, which makes them ideal candidates for targets.…”

“…has accumulated 660 million users worldwide and on average users interact with XiaoIce 60 times a month 4 .…”

“…As an illustrative example, Microsoft XiaoIce has been an extremely popular social chatbot since it was released in 2014. XiaoIce has accumulated 660 million users worldwide and on average users interact with XiaoIce 60 times a month 4 .…”