Multi-Task Learning for Metaphor Detection with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and Word Sense Disambiguation

Abstract The current deep learning works on metaphor detection have only considered this task independently, ignoring the useful knowledge from the related tasks and knowledge resources. In this work, we introduce two novel mechanisms to improve the performance of the deep learning models for metaphor detection. The first mechanism employs graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) with dependency parse trees to directly connect the words of interest with their important context words for metaphor detection. The GCN networks in this work also present a novel control mechanism to filter the learned representation vectors to retain the most important information for metaphor detection. The second mechanism, on the other hand, features a multi-task learning framework that exploits the similarity between word sense disambiguation and metaphor detection to transfer the knowledge between the two tasks. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, yielding the state-of-the-art performance over several datasets.