# A Perspective on Literary Metaphor in the Context of Generative AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01053 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01053/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [FUDGE: Controlled Text Generation With Future Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05218/) (2021)
- [Evaluation of Text Generation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14799/) (2020)
- [Participatory Research for Low-resourced Machine Translation: A Case Study in African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02353/) (2020)
- [MasakhaNER: Named Entity Recognition for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11811/) (2021)
- [Masakhane -- Machine Translation For Africa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11529/) (2020)
- [MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06779/) (2021)
- [Deep-speare: A Joint Neural Model of Poetic Language, Meter and Rhyme](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03491/) (2018)
- [Human Evaluation of Creative NLG Systems: An Interdisciplinary Survey on Recent Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00308/) (2021)
- [The Great Misalignment Problem in Human Evaluation of NLP Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05361/) (2021)
- [Augmenting Poetry Composition with Verse by Verse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17205/) (2021)
- [AfriKI: Machine-in-the-Loop Afrikaans Poetry Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16190/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Accepted with Minor Revisions: Value of AI-Assisted Scientific Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12529/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

At the intersection of creative text generation and literary theory, this study explores the role of literary metaphor and its capacity to generate a range of meanings. In this regard, literary metaphor is vital to the development of any particular language. To investigate whether the inclusion of original figurative language improves textual quality, we trained an LSTM-based language model in Afrikaans. The network produces phrases containing compellingly novel figures of speech. Specifically, the emphasis falls on how AI might be utilised as a defamiliarisation technique, which disrupts expected uses of language to augment poetic expression. Providing a literary perspective on text generation, the paper raises thought-provoking questions on aesthetic value, interpretation and evaluation.