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DAMETA: An LLM Benchmark for Danish Metaphor Interpretation with Systematically Varied Distractors

We present DAMETA, the first evaluation benchmark for Danish metaphor interpretation in language models, derived from the following sources: an annotated corpus (the Dafig Corpus), the Danish dictionary (DDO) and culture reviews in Danish newspapers. Each of the 900 data instances contains a sentence with a metaphorical target word and four human-created paraphrase options; one correct interpretation and three systematic errors or distractors: i) a false literal paraphrase (typically concrete), ii) a false figurative paraphrase (typically abstract), and iii) a false contradictory paraphrase. The benchmark is tested on seven language models, and 5% of the data is further tested on humans for comparison. Results show, among others, that when informed in the prompt that the target word is a metaphor, the models tend to be most distracted by the false figurative paraphrase; in contrast, when uninformed about the metaphorical setting, the models are more distracted by the false literal paraphrase. The dataset goes beyond standard by incorporating descriptive metadata regarding metaphor conventionality on a 3-graded scale (lexicalised, implicit, and ad-hoc), alongside a range of dictionary-derived source domains (military, gastronomy, health, meteorology, etc.). These metadata enable deeper analysis and potentially innovative insights of model performance regarding creativity, language change, and culture-sensitivity.