{"pk":24148,"title":"Interpretation of Novel Literary Metaphors by Humans and GPT-4","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Despite the exceptional performance of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and reasoning, there has been sharp disagreement as to whether their abilities extend to more creative human abilities. A core example is the interpretation of novel metaphors. Given the enormous and non-curated text corpora used to train LLMs, a serious obstacle to designing tests is the need to obtain novel yet high-quality metaphors that are unlikely to have been included in the training data. Here we assessed the ability of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art large language model, to provide natural-language interpretations of novel literary metaphors drawn from Serbian poetry and translated into English. Human judges‚Äîblind to the fact that an AI model was involved‚Äîrated metaphor interpretations generated by GPT-4 as superior to those provided by a group of college students. In interpreting reversed metaphors, GPT-4, as well as humans, exhibited signs of sensitivity to the Gricean cooperative principle. These results indicate that LLMs such as GPT-4 have acquired an emergent ability to interpret literary metaphors.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Artificial Intelligence; Natural Language Processing; Representation"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9g40q0bh","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Nicholas","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ichien","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pennsylvania","department":""},{"first_name":"Du≈°an","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stamenkoviƒá","name_suffix":"","institution":"Södertörn University","department":""},{"first_name":"Keith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Holyoak","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California, Los Angeles","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24148/galley/13744/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/24148/galley/21300/download/"}]}