Chinese Two-part Allegorical Sayings Reading Comprehension: Exploration from Reasoning to Metaphor

Abstract

The Two-Part Allegorical Saying (TPAS) is a Chinese linguistic phenomenon with a riddle-explanation structure, and an important component of Chinese metaphors. Existing research has primarily used TPAS to assist other semantic tasks, but lacks in-depth exploration of its intrinsic mechanisms: semantic rhetoric, logical reasoning, and metaphorical expression. To address this gap, we construct the first Chinese TPAS Reading Comprehension dataset (CTRC), which contains 18,103 TPASs and 75,296 passages. We frame it as a cloze test where the model selects the most suitable TPAS from candidates to fill passage blanks. To tackle the challenges of this CTRC task, we propose a Multi-view TPAS Contrastive Learning Network (MTCLN). Firstly, the joint vector cross-projection module extracts the rhetorical features of TPAS, such as homophonic puns, through vector space mapping to mitigate the semantic deviations caused by rhetoric. Then, the softened contrastive learning module strengthens the modeling of TPAS logical reasoning through feature association. Finally, the multi-view feature fusion module integrates contextual semantics with diverse TPAS features to facilitate the understanding of metaphorical expressions. Experiments on the CTRC dataset demonstrate that MTCLN achieves an average accuracy of 67.47%, outperforming large language models by 25.48%.