IRFL: Image Recognition of Figurative Language
This work addresses the problem of AI understanding figurative language across text and images, which is incremental as it introduces a new dataset and benchmark.
The authors tackled the challenge of multimodal figurative language understanding by creating the IRFL dataset and benchmark, finding that state-of-the-art models performed at 22% accuracy compared to humans at 97%.
Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes, and idioms are integral parts of human communication. They are ubiquitous in many forms of discourse, allowing people to convey complex, abstract ideas and evoke emotion. As figurative forms are often conveyed through multiple modalities (e.g., both text and images), understanding multimodal figurative language is an important AI challenge, weaving together profound vision, language, commonsense and cultural knowledge. In this work, we develop the Image Recognition of Figurative Language (IRFL) dataset. We leverage human annotation and an automatic pipeline we created to generate a multimodal dataset, and introduce two novel tasks as a benchmark for multimodal figurative language understanding. We experimented with state-of-the-art vision and language models and found that the best (22%) performed substantially worse than humans (97%). We release our dataset, benchmark, and code, in hopes of driving the development of models that can better understand figurative language.