The Secret of Metaphor on Expressing Stronger Emotion
This work addresses a fundamental question in NLP about emotion expression, but it is incremental as it builds on known effects of metaphors.
The study investigated why metaphors convey stronger emotions than literal expressions, finding that metaphors are generally more specific, and when specificity is matched, the emotional expression gap significantly narrows.
Metaphors are proven to have stronger emotional impact than literal expressions. Although this conclusion is shown to be promising in benefiting various NLP applications, the reasons behind this phenomenon are not well studied. This paper conducts the first study in exploring how metaphors convey stronger emotion than their literal counterparts. We find that metaphors are generally more specific than literal expressions. The more specific property of metaphor can be one of the reasons for metaphors' superiority in emotion expression. When we compare metaphors with literal expressions with the same specificity level, the gap of emotion expressing ability between both reduces significantly. In addition, we observe specificity is crucial in literal language as well, as literal language can express stronger emotion by making it more specific.