Processing of figurative language is a rapidly growing area in NLP, including computational modeling of metaphors, idioms, puns, irony, sarcasm, simile, and other figures. Characteristic to all areas of human activity (from poetic, ordinary, scientific, social media) 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, interpretation and generation indispensable for any semantics-oriented NLP application.

The workshop is the third edition of the biennial Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, whose first edition was held at NAACL 2018 and the second -- at ACL 2020. The workshop builds upon a long series of related workshops that the current organizers have been involved with: “Metaphor in NLP” series (2013-2016) and “Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity” series (2009-2010). The scope incorporates various types of figurative language, with the aim of maintaining and nourishing a community of NLP researchers interested in this topic. The main focus is on computational modeling 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, formal, or a quantitative framework. In addition, we will hold two shared tasks: grounded understanding of figurative language and euphemism detection, as described further 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, parallelism

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

• Datasets for evaluation of tools, evaluation methodologies and frameworks for automated processing of figurative language

Processing of figurative language for NLP applications

• Figurative language in sentiment analysis; dialogue systems; computational social science; educational applications

• Figurative language and mental health

• Figurative language in digital humanities

Figurative language and cognition

• Cognitive models of processing of figurative language by the human brain

Figurative language in social context

• Figurative language in political communication; social media

• 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

Sept 7 14, 2022: Paper submission deadline

Sept 30 Oct 5, 2022: ARR commitment date

Oct 9 12, 2022: Notification of acceptance

Oct 23, 2022: Camera-ready papers due

December 8, 2022: Workshop