In search of semantic distanceBrglez, Mojca (Avtor) Vintar, Špela (Avtor) metaphorsemantic distanceword embeddingsnoun phrasesPhrases such as burning question, digital waste or invasion of technol- ogy are relatively ordinary expressions understood by any speaker of English. While diverse in structure and meaning, they demonstrate a semantic tension between the basic meanings of a metaphoric and a non-metaphoric constituent. Albeit frequent in discourse, they remain a challenge for automatic language processing systems, especially for smaller, less represented languages. In this work, we inspect a broad array of language models to embed noun phrases in Slovene and in- vestigate the potential of word embeddings to identify metaphoric phrases via the semantic distance of its constituents as measured via cosine similarity. The study shows both static and contextual mono- lingual embeddings encode relevant semantic information while mul- tilingual embeddings demonstrate no significant effect in this exper- imental setting. Moreover, the study unravels the most effective lay- ers for basic meaning representation and highlights the influence of other, non-semantic factors on cosine similarity. By shedding light on these mechanisms, the study provides new insights for both metaphor processing and our understanding of the inner workings of language models.20252026-04-20 10:35:30Članek v reviji181926UDK: 81'373.72:81'322:34ISSN pri članku: 2299-856XDOI: 10.15398/jlm.v13i2.437COBISS_ID: 254876675sl