Project C04: Metaphors as an explanation tool
Project C04 investigates metaphors as a specific means to make difficult phenomena interpretable. The innovative aspect is to regard both highlighting and hiding processes when metaphors are utilized in explanations. The project aims to understand how metaphors may either facilitate or impede understanding, and how this understanding can be applied in AI systems to construct metaphors. The project contributes to our understanding of explanation spaces and to the principles by which explanations are generated or tailored to the needs of an explainee by making choices in the explanation space, that is, by systematically highlighting and hiding aspects of the explanandum.
Research areas: Psychology, Computer science
Student assistans
Paul David Fährmann, Paderborn University
Annika Korth, Paderborn University
Celina Moormann, Paderborn University
Hannah Osthövener, Paderborn University
Julian Vögel, Leibniz University Hannover
Publications
Agency in metaphors of explaining: An analysis of scientific texts
I. Scharlau, K.J. Rohlfing, (2025).
An annotated corpus of elicited metaphors of explaining and understanding using MIPVU
P. Porwol, I. Scharlau, An Annotated Corpus of Elicited Metaphors of Explaining and Understanding Using MIPVU, OSF, 2025.
Investigating Co-Constructive Behavior of Large Language Models in Explanation Dialogues
L. Fichtel, M. Spliethöver, E. Hüllermeier, P. Jimenez, N. Klowait, S. Kopp, A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo, A. Robrecht, I. Scharlau, L. Terfloth, A.-L. Vollmer, H. Wachsmuth, ArXiv:2504.18483 (2025).
Investigating the Impact of Conceptual Metaphors on LLM-based NLI through Shapley Interactions
M. Sengupta, M. Muschalik, F. Fumagalli, B. Hammer, E. Hüllermeier, D. Ghosh, H. Wachsmuth, in: Accepted in Findings , EMNLP , 2025.
Investigating Co-Constructive Behavior of Large Language Models in Explanation Dialogues
L. Fichtel, M. Spliethöver, E. Hüllermeier, P. Jimenez, N. Klowait, S. Kopp, A.-C. Ngonga Ngomo, A. Robrecht, I. Scharlau, L. Terfloth, A.-L. Vollmer, H. Wachsmuth, in: Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Association for Computational Linguistics, Avignon, France, n.d.
What do mteaphors of understanding hide?
P.F. Porwol, I. Scharlau, Studia Neofilologiczne. Rozprawy Jezykoznawcze (Neophilological Studies. Linguistic Studies) (2025).
Metaphors in 24 WIRED Level 5 Videos (Data corpus)
I. Scharlau, K. Miriam, Metaphors in 24 WIRED Level 5 Videos (Data Corpus), OSF, 2025.
Is explaining more like showing or more like building? Agency in metaphors of explaining
P.F. Porwol, I. Scharlau, Frontiers in Psychology (n.d.).
Analyzing the Use of Metaphors in News Editorials for Political Framing
M. Sengupta, R. El Baff, M. Alshomary, H. Wachsmuth, in: K. Duh, H. Gomez, S. Bethard (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), Association for Computational Linguistics, Mexico City, Mexico, 2024, pp. 3621–3631.
When to use a metaphor: Metaphors in dialogical explanations with addressees of different expertise
I. Scharlau, M. Körber, M. Sengupta, H. Wachsmuth, Frontiers in Language Sciences 3 (2024) 1474924.
Modeling Highlighting of Metaphors in Multitask Contrastive Learning Paradigms
M. Sengupta, M. Alshomary, I. Scharlau, H. Wachsmuth, in: H. Bouamor, J. Pino, K. Bali (Eds.), Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, Association for Computational Linguistics, Singapore, 2023, pp. 4636–4659.
Back to the Roots: Predicting the Source Domain of Metaphors using Contrastive Learning
M. Sengupta, M. Alshomary, H. Wachsmuth, in: Proceedings of the 2022 Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, 2022.
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