Wisdom in Unity: The Role of Multilingual Training in Figurative Language Identification in Proverbs

Abstract

Although multilingual approaches to figurative language identification are not new, the shift beyond language homogeneous training data requires a clearer understanding of the contribution of translated multilingual supervision. We examine this question using 742 proverb concepts across 6,787 translated instances in seven languages. We evaluate five models, including multilingual encoders and instruction tuned LLMs, under progressively increasing levels of multilingual supervision. Moreover, we introduce a multidimensional annotation framework for proverbs that characterizes them through four complementary figurative forms: Metaphorical, Moral/Advisory, Cause-Effect, and Culture Specific. Our findings show that approximately 50% of the translated multilingual training data is sufficient to achieve near-optimal figurative language identification performance. We further show that combining diverse figurative forms yields the strongest overall performance. A notable finding is that the least frequent figurative form, Culture Specific, exhibits the largest performance gains under multilingual supervision. Furthermore, the Moral/Advisory and Culture Specific forms contribute most to the performance of instruction-tuned LLMs on figurative language identification. These findings motivate multilingual figurative language identification to move beyond metaphor-centric taxonomies toward concept level multidimensional frameworks that explicitly model complementary forms of figurative meaning.