Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures across domains. To what extent do today's pre-trained language models understand the operation of these metaphors? This question is addressed in "Do Large Language Models Grasp Metaphors?", a talk by Dagmar Gromann of the University of Vienna. The talk is part of OFAI's 2023 Fall Lecture Series.
Members of the public are cordially invited to attend the talk in person (OFAI, Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna) or via Zoom on Wednesday, 22 November 2023 at 18:30 CET (UTC+1):
URL: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84282442460?pwd=NHVhQnJXOVdZTWtNcWNRQllaQWFnQT09
Meeting ID: 842 8244 2460
Passcode: 678868
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Talk abstract: Conceptual metaphors present a powerful cognitive vehicle to transfer knowledge structures from a source to a target domain, e.g. WORDS ARE WEAPONS as in "Your words pierce my heart". Prior neural approaches focus primarily on detecting whether natural language sequences are metaphoric or literal. In this talk, I will present work on probing metaphoric knowledge in pre-trained language models. The focus is on testing their capability to predict source domains given an input sentence and a target domain in English and Spanish. Several methods from fine-tuning to few-shot prompting are tested. Results show that the most common error type is the hallucination of source domains.
Speaker biography: Dagmar Gromann is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna, with prior post-doc positions at IIIA-CSIC in Barcelona, Spain and TU Dresden, Germany. Her research focuses on neural methods for knowledge extraction of cognitive and multilingual concepts as well as language technologies, including their socio-technical implications, e.g. gender bias. In terms of cognitive concepts, she is particularly interested in image schemas inspired by embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, she has co-created a new master's program called Multilingual Technologies that is jointly organized by the University of Vienna and FH Campus Wien and represents the first computational linguistic program in Austria.
