Modelling the interplay of metaphor and emotion through multitask learning

Verna Dankers, Marek Rei, Martha Lewis, Ekaterina Shutova


Abstract
Metaphors allow us to convey emotion by connecting physical experiences and abstract concepts. The results of previous research in linguistics and psychology suggest that metaphorical phrases tend to be more emotionally evocative than their literal counterparts. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between metaphor and emotion within a computational framework, by proposing the first joint model of these phenomena. We experiment with several multitask learning architectures for this purpose, involving both hard and soft parameter sharing. Our results demonstrate that metaphor identification and emotion prediction mutually benefit from joint learning and our models advance the state of the art in both of these tasks.
Anthology ID:
D19-1227
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2218–2229
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1227
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1227
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Verna Dankers, Marek Rei, Martha Lewis, and Ekaterina Shutova. 2019. Modelling the interplay of metaphor and emotion through multitask learning. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 2218–2229, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modelling the interplay of metaphor and emotion through multitask learning (Dankers et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1227.pdf