Testing the Ability of Language Models to Interpret Figurative Language

Abstract: Figurative and metaphorical language are commonplace in discourse, and figurative expressions play an important role in communication and cognition. However, figurative language has been a relatively under-studied area in NLP, and it remains an open question to what extent modern LLMs can interpret nonliteral phrases. To address this question, we introduce Fig-QA, a Winograd-style nonliteral language understanding task consisting of correctly interpreting paired figurative phrases with divergent meanings. We evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art LLMs on this task, and find that although LLMs achieve performance significantly over chance, they still fall short of human performance, particularly in zero- or few-shot settings. This suggests that further work is needed to improve the nonliteral reasoning capabilities of LLMs.