  Figures of speech help people express abstract concepts and evoke stronger
emotions than literal expressions, thereby making texts more creative and
engaging. Due to its pervasive and fundamental character, figurative language
understanding has been addressed in Natural Language Processing, but it's
highly understudied in a multilingual setting and when considering more than
one figure of speech at the same time. To bridge this gap, we introduce
multilingual multi-figurative language modelling, and provide a benchmark for
sentence-level figurative language detection, covering three common figures of
speech and seven languages. Specifically, we develop a framework for figurative
language detection based on template-based prompt learning. In so doing, we
unify multiple detection tasks that are interrelated across multiple figures of
speech and languages, without requiring task- or language-specific modules.
Experimental results show that our framework outperforms several strong
baselines and may serve as a blueprint for the joint modelling of other
interrelated tasks.
