# ConMeC: A Dataset for Metonymy Resolution with Common Nouns

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Sensitivity to The Order of Options in Multiple-Choice Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11483/) (2023)
- [Just Ask One More Time! Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08154/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11041/) (2025)
- [Target Word Masking for Location Metonymy Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16097/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Computational Approach to Visual Metonymy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17706/) (2026)
- [Evaluating the Impact of Verbal Multiword Expressions on Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17458/) (2025)
- [From Input Perception to Predictive Insight: Modeling Model Blind Spots Before They Become Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20065/) (2025)
- [Exploring Concreteness Through a Figurative Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18296/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Metonymy plays an important role in our daily communication. People naturally think about things using their most salient properties or commonly related concepts. For example, by saying "The bus decided to skip our stop today," we actually mean that the bus driver made the decision, not the bus. Prior work on metonymy resolution has mainly focused on named entities. However, metonymy involving common nouns (such as desk, baby, and school) is also a frequent and challenging phenomenon. We argue that NLP systems should be capable of identifying the metonymic use of common nouns in context. We create a new metonymy dataset ConMeC, which consists of 6,000 sentences, where each sentence is paired with a target common noun and annotated by humans to indicate whether that common noun is used metonymically or not in that context. We also introduce a chain-of-thought based prompting method for detecting metonymy using large language models (LLMs). We evaluate our LLM-based pipeline, as well as a supervised BERT model on our dataset and three other metonymy datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that LLMs could achieve performance comparable to the supervised BERT model on well-defined metonymy categories, while still struggling with instances requiring nuanced semantic understanding. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/SaptGhosh/ConMeC.