Call for Participation

Workshop on Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data (NLE 2026)

To be held in conjunction with LREC 2026 on 11 May 2026, https://www.elra.info/lrec2026

Conference venue: Palau de Congressos de Palma, Palma de Mallorca (Spain)

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/nle2026/home

Overview

Non-Literal Expressions (NLEs) in natural language are a reflection of fundamental cognitive processes such as analogical reasoning and categorisation, and are deeply rooted in everyday communication. NLEs understanding is therefore an essential task for language modeling. This task is especially challenging because it cannot be tackled by falling back on individual word meanings, but requires taking into account larger chunks of surrounding text or even contextual information. At the same time, it is important because the reliable processing of NLEs is relevant for optimizing downstream tasks like translation and summarization.

This workshop focuses on understanding of Non-Literal Expressions. While most of the earlier work on NLEs had been devoted to metaphor and metonymy, recent activities target other forms of NLEs as well, e.g., hyperbole (deliberate exaggeration), litotes (understatement), rhetorical questions, and irony. Humanly annotated corpora for NLEs have very recently started becoming available to the research community and may serve as the basis for data-driven approaches to NLEs processing, with the interrelated goals of first identifying and then interpreting such expressions. Such data is mostly of high linguistic quality, but still very limited in size. Thus, the workshop's focus is on adaptation of Language Models (LMs) and Deep Learning (DL) for processing of Non-Literal Expressions with limited high-quality data, since such constructs still pose big identification and processing challenges in natural language analysis tasks.

The workshop focuses on the use of techniques like self-training for leveraging unlabelled data, as well as in work that focuses on the incorporation of external linguistic resources and knowledge injection to enrich features, and also in research that describes work on utilisation of multitask learning with the aim to benefit from related tasks. The workshop highlights the necessity of high-quality data, as well as cross-lingual datasets.

Invited Speaker

- Debanjan Ghosh, Princeton, USA

Workshop Program

Monday, May 11, 2026

9:00–13:00 Learning Non-Literal Expressions with Small Data Room: 4 Chair: Valia Kordoni

9:00–9:10 Introduction

Oral Session 1

9:10–9:50 Challenges in Japanese Euphemism Classification: An Analysis of Pretrained Japanese and Multilingual Models Noriko Takahashi, Whitney Poh, Libby Barak, JIng Peng and Anna Feldman

9:50–10:10 Steering Pragmatic Interpretation in LLMs: A Diagnostic Evaluation of Few- Shot and Reasoning-Based Prompting for Indirect Speech Acts. Massimiliano Orsini and Dominique Brunato

10:10–10:30 Injecting Structured Lexicographic Knowledge into LLMs for Non-Literal Expression Disambiguation: A Controlled Study on Croatian Slobodan Beliga, Ivana Filipovic Petrović and Ana Meštrović

10:30–11:00 Coffee break

11:00–11:40 Poster session

- Metaphor Identification in Spanish Oncological Discourse: The Role of Explicit Meaning in Low-Resource Settings Lucia Pitarch, Jordi Bernad and Gemma Bel-Enguix

- Exploring Detection of Complex, Non-Literal Expressions of Cultural Motifs Ibrahim H. Alyami and Mark A. Finlayson

- Artful Writing, Authentic Emotions: Distinguishing Human-Written from LLM-Generated Metaphors by Annotation and Classification Michaela Regneri, Nooshin Aghajari and Thomas Kroedel

- Creation and Validation of a Monolingual Spanish NLI Dataset for MetaphorInterpretation via Model-in-the-Loop Alec Sanchez-Montero, Gemma Bel-Enguix and SERGIO LUIS OJEDA TRUEBA

- A Hybrid Architecture for Metonymy Detection in Marathi Pratibha Dongare

- Contextualising (Im)plausible Events Triggers Figurative Language Annerose Eichel, Tonmoy Rakshit and Sabine Schulte im Walde

Oral Session 2

11:40–12:00 A Novel Dataset and Three Ways to Approach Automatic Metaphor Detection in German Religious Online Forums Sebastian Reimann and Tatjana Scheffler

12:00–12:20 Decomposing Creativity: Two Small Datasets Combining Originality Ratings and Metaphor Annotations Emilie Sitter, Sina Zarrieß, Omar Momen and Berenike Herrmann

Invited Talk

12:20–13:00 Unveiling Reasoning in Small Language Models: Insights into Literal and Non-Literal Understanding Debanjan Gosh

Endorsements

The workshop is endorsed by: Collaborative Research Centre 1412 "REGISTER" funded by the DFG Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)

Programme Committee

- Beata Beigman Klebanov, ETS, USA - Maria Berger, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany - Yuri Bizzoni, Aarhus University, Denmark - Kenneth Church, VecML Inc., USA - Stefanie Dipper, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany - Markus Egg, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany - Anna Feldman, Montclair State University, USA - Debanjan Ghosh, Princeton, USA - Valia Kordoni, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany - Emmy Liu, CMU, USA - Petya Osenova, Sofia University "St. Kl. Ohridski", Bulgaria - Sebastian Padó, IMS Stuttgart, Germany - Gudrun Reijnierse, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands - Sebastian Reimann, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany - Adam Roussel, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany - Tatjana Scheffler, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany - Sabine Schulte im Walde, Universität Stuttgart - Vered Shwartz, The University of British Columbia, Canada - Caroline Sporleder, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany - Egon Stemle, EURAC, Italy

Organizers

• Markus Egg — Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany • Valia Kordoni - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Contact: kordonie at rz.hu-berlin.de