In search of semantic distance : metaphoric and non-metaphoric constructions in static and contextual representations

Brglez, Mojca (author), Vintar, Špela (author)

Phrases 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.

• Language: English
• Keywords: metaphor, semantic distance, word embeddings, noun phrases
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Publication date: 01.01.2025
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: Str. 207–260
• Numbering: Vol. 13, no. 2
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-181926
• UDC: 81'373.72:81'322:34
• ISSN on article: 2299-856X
• DOI: 10.15398/jlm.v13i2.437
• COBISS.SI-ID: 254876675
• Publication date in RUL: 20.04.2026

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Journal of language modelling
• Shortened title: J. Lang. Model.
• Publisher: Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences
• ISSN: 2299-856X
• COBISS.SI-ID: 51953250

Licences

• License: CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Description: This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: metafora, semantična razdalja, besedne vložitve, samostalniške besedne zveze

Projects

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P6-0215-2019
• Name: Slovenski jezik - bazične, kontrastivne in aplikativne raziskave