Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding

Understand

Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP.

• Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in language models (LMs).
• However, the use of figurative language is an expression of our cultural and societal experiences, making it difficult for these phrases to be universally applicable.
• In this work, we create a figurative language inference dataset, \datasetname, for seven diverse languages associated with a variety of cultures: Hindi, Indonesian, Javanese, Kannada, Sundanese, Swahili and Yoruba.