The Delta of Thought: Channeling Rivers of Commonsense Knowledge in the Sea of Metaphorical Interpretations

We propose a system called METCL (Metaphor Elaboration in Typicality-Based Compositional Logic) able to generate and identify metaphors by using the TCL reasoning framework, specialized in human-like commonsense concept combination. We show that METCL is able to improve both state-of-the-art Large Language Models (e.g DeepSeekR1, GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-Max) and symbolic ones in the task of metaphor identification. Additionally, we show how the metaphors generated by METCL are generally well accepted by human subjects. The obtained results are encouraging and pave the way to research in automatic metaphor generation and comprehension based on the assumption that metaphors interpretation can be partially regarded as a categorization problem relying on generative commonsense concept combination.