I was on an academic NSA project 10+ years ago for extracting metaphors from text. It was necessary for translations - the metaphor "my lawyer is a shark" has c

I was on an academic NSA project 10+ years ago for extracting metaphors from text. It was necessary for translations - the metaphor "my lawyer is a shark" has completely different meanings in different cultures/languages. We started out using taxonomies/trees of words. The word "lawyer" is not an animal but the word "shark" is, so it's probably a metaphor. The NSA said that this was the wrong approach so we switched to an ngrams approach which also worked. However these llm models are surprisingly good at understanding metaphors and how they are interpreted in different cultures. Better than a human.