Figurative language processing is a rapidly growing area in NLP, including processing of metaphors, idioms, puns, irony, sarcasm, as well as other figures. Characteristic to all areas of human activity (from poetic to ordinary to scientific) and, thus, to all types of discourse, figurative language becomes an important problem for NLP systems. Its ubiquity in language has been established in a number of corpus studies and the role it plays in human reasoning has been confirmed in psychological experiments. This makes figurative language an important research area for computational and cognitive linguistics, and its automatic identification and interpretation indispensable for any semantics-oriented NLP application.

The work on figurative language in NLP and AI started in the 1980s, mainly focusing on metaphor and metonymy, and providing us with a wealth of ideas on the structure and mechanisms of these phenomena. In recent years, the problem of figurative language understanding has been steadily gaining interest within the NLP community, with a growing number of approaches exploiting statistical and neural techniques and venturing into further areas, such as sarcasm, irony and puns. Advances in other areas of computational semantics continue to open many new avenues for the creation of open-domain, large-scale tools for recognition, interpretation, and generation of figurative language. In addition, the growth of the area of social media analysis provides an exciting platform to study figurative language in its social and pragmatic context.

The goal of the workshop is to build upon the successful start of the Metaphor in NLP workshop series, substantially expanding its scope to incorporate the rapidly growing body of research on various types of figurative language in NLP, with the aim of maintaining and nourishing a community of NLP researchers interested in this topic. The main focus of the workshop will be on computational modelling of figurative language using state-of-the-art NLP techniques. However, papers on cognitive, linguistic, social, rhetorical, and applied aspects are also of interest, provided that they are presented within a computational, a formal, or a quantitative framework. In addition, we intend to conduct two shared tasks on metaphor and sarcasm detection, as described here.

The workshop will solicit both full papers and short papers for either oral or poster presentation. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, the following:

Identification and interpretation of different types of figurative language

• Linguistic, conceptual and extended metaphor
• Irony, sarcasm, puns
• Simile, metonymy, personification, synecdoche, hyperbole

Systems for processing figurative language that incorporate state-of-the-art NLP methods

• Machine learning for figurative language processing
• The use of lexical resources in figurative language processing
• Paraphrasing of figurative language
• Generation of figurative language
• Multilingual processing and translation of figurative language

Resources and evaluation

• Annotation of figurative language in corpora
• Figurative language in lexical resources
• Datasets for evaluation of tools for automated processing of figurative language
• Evaluation methodologies and frameworks

Processing of figurative language for NLP applications

• Figurative language in sentiment analysis
• Figurative language in computational social science
• Figurative language in educational applications
• Figurative language and mental health
• Figurative language in dialog systems
• Figurative language in digital humanities

Figurative language and cognition

• Computational approaches to metaphor and other figures inspired by cognitive evidence
• Cognitive models of processing of figurative language by the human brain
• Models of metaphor and other figures across languages and cultures

Figurative language in social context

• Figurative language in political communication
• Figurative language in education
• Figurative language in social media

Interaction of figurative language with other linguistic phenomena

• Figurative language and compositionality
• Figurative language and abstractness / concreteness
• Figurative language and sentiment
• Figurative language and argumentation
• Figurative language and grammar

Important Dates

April 23, 2020: Paper submission deadline

May 15, 2020: Notification of acceptance

May 25, 2020: Camera-ready papers due

July 9, 2020: Workshop