UCSC NLP T6 at SemEval-2025 Task 1: Leveraging LLMs and VLMs for Idiomatic Understanding

AbstractIdiomatic expressions pose a significant challenge for natural language models due to their non-compositional nature. In this work, we address Subtask 1 of the SemEval-2025 Task 1 (ADMIRE), which requires distinguishing between idiomatic and literal usages of phrases and identify images that align with the relevant meaning.Our approach integrates large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models, and we show how different prompting techniques improve those models’ ability to identify and explain the meaning of idiomatic language.