2023/03/27 by Ron Yosef, Yonatan Bitton, Yosef, Ron +3 · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Psychology · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Subtitles and Audiovisual Media
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.15445
openalex publication_date 2023/03/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and idioms are integral parts of human communication. They are ubiquitous in many forms of discourse, allowing people to convey complex, abstract ideas and evoke emotion. As figurative forms are often conveyed through multiple modalities (e.g., both text and images), understanding multimodal figurative language is an important AI challenge, weaving together profound vision, language, commonsense and cultural knowledge. In this work, we develop the Image Recognition of Figurative Language (IRFL) dataset. We leverage human annotation and an automatic pipeline we created to generate a multimodal dataset, and introduce two novel tasks as a benchmark for multimodal figurative language understanding. We experimented with state-of-the-art vision and language models and found that the best (22%) performed substantially worse than humans (97%). We release our dataset, benchmark, and code, in hopes of driving the development of models that can better understand figurative language.