# Metaphorical Paraphrase Generation: Feeding Metaphorical Language Models with Literal Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04756 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04756/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT's Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04341/) (2019)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [A Primer in BERTology: What we know about how BERT works](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12327/) (2020)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [MASS: Masked Sequence to Sequence Pre-training for Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02450/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Data Augmentation for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03158/) (2021)
- [Larger-Scale Transformers for Multilingual Masked Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00572/) (2021)
- [MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06779/) (2021)
- [Confronting Abusive Language Online: A Survey from the Ethical and Human Rights Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12305/) (2020)
- [It's not Rocket Science : Interpreting Figurative Language in Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00087/) (2021)
- [Neural Metaphor Detection in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09653/) (2018)
- [Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01228/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study presents a new approach to metaphorical paraphrase generation by masking literal tokens of literal sentences and unmasking them with metaphorical language models. Unlike similar studies, the proposed algorithm does not only focus on verbs but also on nouns and adjectives. Despite the fact that the transfer rate for the former is the highest (56%), the transfer of the latter is feasible (24% and 31%). Human evaluation showed that our system-generated metaphors are considered more creative and metaphorical than human-generated ones while when using our transferred metaphors for data augmentation improves the state of the art in metaphorical sentence classification by 3% in F1.