Processing of figurative language is a rapidly growing area in NLP, including
computational modeling of metaphors, idioms, puns, irony, sarcasm, simile,
and other figures. Characteristic to all areas of human activity (from
poetic, ordinary, scientific, social media) and, thus, to all types of
discourse, figurative language becomes an important problem for NLP systems.
Its ubiquity in language has been established in a number of corpus studies
and the role it plays in human reasoning has been confirmed in psychological
experiments. This makes figurative language an important research area for
computational and cognitive linguistics, and its automatic identification,
interpretation and generation indispensable for any semantics-oriented NLP
application.
The proposed workshop will be the fourth edition of the biennial Workshop on
Figurative Language Processing, whose first editions were held at NAACL 2018,
ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2022, respectively. The workshop builds upon a long series
of related workshops that the current organizers have been involved with:
“Metaphor in NLP” series (2013-2016) and “Computational Approaches to
Linguistic Creativity” series (2009-2010). We expand the scope to
incorporate various types of figurative language, with the aim of maintaining
and nourishing a community of NLP researchers interested in this topic. The
main focus will be on computational modeling of figurative language, however
papers on cognitive, linguistic, social, rhetorical, and applied aspects are
also of interest, provided that they are presented within a computational,
formal, or a quantitative framework. Recent advancement in language models
have led to several works on figurative language understanding (Chakrabarty
et al 2022a; Chakrabarty et al 2022b; Liu et al 2022; Hu et al 2023) and
generation (Stowe et al 2021; Chakrabarty et al 2021; Sun et al 2022; Tian et
al 2021) At the same time large language models have opened up opportunities
to utilize figurative language in scientific (Kim et al 2023) as well as
creative writing (Chakrabarty et al 2022c; Tian et al 2022). Additionally
there have also been recent work on multimodal figurative language generation
(Chakrabarty et al 2023; Akula et al 2023), understanding (Hessel et al 2023;
Yosef et al 2023) and interpretation (Hwang et al 2023; Desai et al 2022;
Kumar et al 2022). We encourage submissions along these axes.
Topics of Interest
The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral
or poster presentation. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the
following:
Identification and interpretation of different types of figurative language:
Linguistic, conceptual and extended metaphor; irony, sarcasm, puns, simile,
metonymy, personification, synecdoche, hyperbole
Generation of different types of figurative language: sarcasm, simile,
metaphors, humor, hyperbole
Multilingual and multimodal figurative language processing
Resources and evaluation
Annotation of figurative language in corpora
Datasets for evaluation of tools
Evaluation methodologies
Figurative use in low-resource languages
Processing of figurative language for NLP applications
Figurative language in sentiment analysis; dialogue systems; computational
social science; educational applications
Figurative language and mental health
Figurative language in digital humanities
Figurative language in creative writing
Figurative language and cognition
Cognitive models of processing of figurative language by the human brain
Human-AI collaboration for figurative language
Shared Tasks
Multilingual euphemisms detection
(for more information refer: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1959/)
Understanding of Figurative Language through Visual Entailment
(for more information refer: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/1970/)
Important Dates
Long, Short, and Demonstration Paper Submission: March 10th, 2024
Long, Short, and Demonstration Paper Notification: April 14th, 2024
Final Paper Submission: April 24th, 2024
Workshop: June 21/22, 2024