# The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13042/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Nominal Metaphor Generation with Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05195/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [FrameBERT: Conceptual Metaphor Detection with Frame Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04834/) (2023)
- [Metaphor Detection with Effective Context Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05611/) (2023)
- [Metaphor Detection via Explicit Basic Meanings Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17268/) (2023)
- [MMTE: Corpus and Metrics for Evaluating Machine Translation Quality of Metaphorical Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13698/) (2024)
- [EmoMeta: A Multimodal Dataset for Fine-grained Emotion Classification in Chinese Metaphors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13483/) (2025)
- [Finding Challenging Metaphors that Confuse Pretrained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16012/) (2024)
- [Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13901/) (2024)
- [Overview of the NLPCC 2024 Shared Task on Chinese Metaphor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04378/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-Based Knowledge Injection for Metaphor Detection: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04306/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Metaphors are proven to have stronger emotional impact than literal expressions. Although this conclusion is shown to be promising in benefiting various NLP applications, the reasons behind this phenomenon are not well studied. This paper conducts the first study in exploring how metaphors convey stronger emotion than their literal counterparts. We find that metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions. The more specific property of metaphor can be one of the reasons for metaphors' superiority in emotion expression. When we compare metaphors with literal expressions with the same specificity level, the gap of emotion expressing ability between both reduces significantly. In addition, we observe specificity is crucial in literal language as well, as literal language can express stronger emotion by making it more specific.