A Cognitively Motivated Multidimensional Framework for Evaluating Metaphor Explanations

Current evaluation of metaphor explanations relies mainly on holistic quality ratings, revealing little about how explanation quality is structured or where human judgments agree and diverge. We introduce a cognitively motivated framework that decomposes metaphor explanation quality into six theoretically grounded dimensions. In a dense annotation study (11,200 ratings), we find that: bfseries(i) explanation quality is genuinely multidimensional; bfseries(ii) annotator disagreement is systematic rather than random; and bfseries(iii) the six dimensions collapse into a shared cluster and two independent axes of judgment. An exploratory feasibility study further shows that a standard automatic evaluation pipeline can recover parts of this structure, predicting the most discriminative dimensions well while its errors correlate human (dis)agreement. Together, these results suggest that multidimensional evaluation offers richer diagnostic insight than holistic ratings, and that automatic evaluators for open-ended generation tasks should be judged on how well they preserve the structure of human judgment.