Research Article

NLP and Figurative Language: A Quantitative Study Exploring the Competence of AI-Powered Bots in Understanding Metaphors and Idioms

Volume: 9 Number: 1 December 31, 2025

NLP and Figurative Language: A Quantitative Study Exploring the Competence of AI-Powered Bots in Understanding Metaphors and Idioms

Abstract

The rapid advancement of technology has led to the development of intelligent software tools that can almost impersonate humans in understanding human language. This has led to a significant advancement in natural language processing (NLP), which combines artificial intelligence with computational linguistics to produce and understand natural languages. The question remains whether these tools can handle the complexity of human language. To determine this, two types of human language, metaphors and idioms, were collected to test the ability of modern AI tools, ChatGPT and Google Bard, in understanding figurative language correctly. These complex languages require advanced intellectual abilities to comprehend. The data included sample sentences from both English and Turkish. Although their performance with metaphors was not as good as with idioms, the findings demonstrated that these AI-powered chatbots have a near-human knowledge of language, showing a high level of proficiency in processing human language.

Keywords

References

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Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Natural Language Processing

Journal Section

Research Article

Early Pub Date

May 5, 2025

Publication Date

December 31, 2025

Submission Date

January 3, 2025

Acceptance Date

April 27, 2025

Published in Issue

Year 2025 Volume: 9 Number: 1

APA
Alhaydar, A. (2025). NLP and Figurative Language: A Quantitative Study Exploring the Competence of AI-Powered Bots in Understanding Metaphors and Idioms. Journal of AI, 9(1), 32-55. https://doi.org/10.61969/jai.1613027

Cited By

Journal of AI
is indexed and abstracted by
WoS Research Commons, DOAJ, OpenAIRE, ERIHPLUS, Google Scholar, Harvard Hollis, Scilit, ROAD

Publisher
Izmir Academy Publishing
www.izmirakademi.org

Although the scope of our journal is related to artificial intelligence studies, the abbreviation "AI" in the name of the journal is derived from "Academy Izmir".