A Self-verified Method for Exploring Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models

Simile tasks are challenging in natural language processing (NLP) because models require adequate world knowledge to produce predictions. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have succeeded in NLP since they learn generic knowledge from a large corpus. The knowledge embedded in PLMs can be used for different kinds of Simile tasks. However, previous work usually explored one type of simile knowledge for a specific simile task, how to fully utilize different types of knowledge embedded in the PLMs requires further exploration. This paper proposes a self-verified method for exploring simile knowledge from PLMs, which allows the PLMs to leverage one type of simile knowledge to self-validate another. To this end, we first enhance PLMs with a novel multi-level simile recognition (MLSR) task that trains PLMs to evaluate the quality of similes. Then the PLMs leverage this evaluation score to assist the simile interpretation and generation tasks. In this way, we connect different types of simile knowledge in PLMs and make better use of them. Experiments on different pre-trained models and multiple publicly available datasets show that our method works for different kinds of PLMs and can explore more accurate simile knowledge for PLMs. Our code/data will be released on GitHub.