When Meaning Isn't Literal: Exploring Idiomatic Meaning Across Languages and Modalities
Idiomatic reasoning, deeply intertwined with metaphor and culture, remains a blind spot for contemporary language models, whose progress skews toward surface-level lexical and semantic cues. For instance, the Bengali idiom \textit{\foreignlanguage{bengali}{\char"0986\char"0999\char"09CD\char"0997\char"09C1 \char"09B0 \char"09AB\char"09B2 \char"099F\char"0995}} (angur fol tok, ``grapes are sour''): it encodes denial-driven rationalization, yet naive models latch onto the literal fox-and-grape imagery. Addressing this oversight, we present ``Mediom,'' a multilingual, multimodal idiom corpus of 3,533 Hindi, Bengali, and Thai idioms, each paired with gold-standard explanations, cross-lingual ...
| Authors | Sarmistha Das, Shreyas Guha, Suvrayan Bandyopadhyay et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 April 2026 |
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