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%.

The multimodal Chinese idiom reading comprehension task aims to select the most appropriate idiom from a candidate list via the given text and image. This poses a significant challenge for the model to comprehend each Chinese idiom accurately. Existing multimodal Chinese idiom reading comprehension methods primarily focus on aligning contextual text and images, while overlooking two key attributes of Chinese idioms.(1) There is a discrepancy between the literal and metaphorical meanings of Chinese idioms. (2) The same Chinese idiom has different meanings in different scenarios, which requires targeted understanding by experts who specialize in different fields. To address the above challenges, we rethink the solution to the multimodal idiom reading comprehension task from a metaphorical perspective and propose a framework named MePe. Firstly, we propose a literal metaphorical semantic graph that systematically transforms the implicit discrepancy between the literal and metaphorical meanings of Chinese idioms into structured explicit relationships, thereby making metaphorical meanings more understandable. Then, we propose a mixture of idiom experts consisting of a literal idiom expert and a metaphorical idiom expert. Through division of labor and collaboration among these experts, we achieve an understanding of the dual meanings of Chinese idioms across different scenarios. Finally, we employ the maximum mean discrepancy to adjust the variance between the literal and metaphorical semantic features of Chinese idioms. By mapping these features onto a shared reproducing kernel Hilbert space, the model can better distinguish between the two based on contextual clues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MePe achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MChIRC dataset.