Exploring Metaphorical Senses and Word Representations for Identifying Metonyms

A metonym is a word with a figurative meaning, similar to a metaphor. Because metonyms are closely related to metaphors, we apply features that are used successfully for metaphor recognition to the task of detecting metonyms. On the ACL SemEval 2007 Task 8 data with gold standard metonym annotations, our system achieved 86.45% accuracy on the location metonyms. Our code can be found on GitHub.Comment: 9 pages, 8 pages conten

Metaphor Identification in Large Texts Corpora

Identifying metaphorical language-use (e.g., sweet child) is one of the challenges facing natural language processing. This paper describes three novel algorithms for automatic metaphor identification. The algorithms are variations of the same core algorithm. We evaluate the algorithms on two corpora of Reuters and the New York Times articles. The paper presents the most comprehensive study of metaphor identification in terms of scope of metaphorical phrases and annotated corpora size. Algorithms’ performance in identifying linguistic phrases as metaphorical or literal has been compared to human judgment. Overall, the algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithm with 71% precision and 27% averaged improvement in prediction over the base-rate of metaphors in the corpus.United States. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)United States. Dept. of Defense (U.S. Army Research Laboratory Contract W911NF-12-C-0021

German Perception Verbs: Automatic Classification of Prototypical and Multiple Non-literal Meanings

This paper presents a token-based automatic classification of German perception verbs into literal vs. multiple non-literal senses. Based on a corpus-based dataset of German perception verbs and their systematic meaning shifts, we identify one verb of each of the four perception classes optical, acoustic, olfactory, haptic, and use Decision Trees relying on syntactic and semantic corpus-based features to classify the verb uses into 3-4 senses each. Our classifier reaches accuracies between 45.5% and 69.4%, in comparison to baselines between 27.5% and 39.0%. In three out of four cases analyzed our classifier’s accuracy is significantly higher than the according baseline

Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning

Metaphor identification in a terminological dictionary

This paper aims at demonstrating that metaphor is not simply a literary device, but an integral part of everyday language. The Theory of Conceptual Metaphor suggests that our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical. Concepts arise from our everyday interaction with the world and semantic structure reflects the conceptual structure. Metaphor, therefore, is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Based on these assumptions, we analyzed a terminological dictionary on environmental law in order to find metaphorically used lexical items. Then, for every such item we tried to determine its most literal meaning in another context. In order to do so, we applied the method for identifying metaphor developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). The results confirm the pervasiveness of metaphor and indicate how polysemy is motivated. Moreover, there seems to be no clear boundaries between literal and figurative language

Metaphoric competence and communicative language ability

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability. In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely Bachman (1990), and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning

Identificación de metáforas en un diccionario terminológico

This paper aims at demonstrating that metaphor is not simply a literary device, but an integral part of everyday language. The Theory of Conceptual Metaphor suggests that our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical. Concepts arise from our everyday interaction with the world and semantic structure reflects the conceptual structure. Metaphor, therefore, is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Based on these assumptions, we analyzed a terminological dictionary on environmental law in order to find metaphorically used lexical items. Then, for every such item we tried to determine its most literal meaning in another context. In order to do so, we applied the method for identifying metaphor developed by the Pragglejaz Group (2007). The results confirm the pervasiveness of metaphor and indicate how polysemy is motivated. Moreover, there seems to be no clear boundaries between literal and figurative language.El presente artículo pretende demostrar que el fenómeno de la metáfora no es simplemente un recurso literario sino que también forma parte integral del lenguaje diario. La Teoría da la Metáfora Conceptual sugiere que nuestro sistema conceptual es en gran parte metafórico. Los conceptos se forman a partir de nuestras interacciones diarias con el mundo que nos rodea y las estructuras semánticas reflejan la estructura conceptual. La metáfora, por lo tanto, es dominante en nuestro quehacer cotidiano, no solamente en el lenguaje sino también en el pensamiento y en la acción. Partiendo de estos supuestos, analizamos un diccionario terminológico sobre legislación medioambiental con el objetivo de encontrar elementos léxicos utilizados metafóricamente. así, intentamos determinar el sentido más literal de cada uno de esos elementos en otros contextos. Los procedimientos que aplicamos para la identificación de metáforas fueron los desarrollados por Pragglejaz Group (2007). Los resultados confirman la presencia dominante de metáforas y explican las causas que motivan la polisemia. asimismo, parece que no existen fronteras definidas entre el lenguaje literal y el figurado

Crowd-Sourcing A High-Quality Dataset for Metaphor Identification in Tweets

Metaphor is one of the most important elements of human communication, especially in informal settings such as social media. There have been a number of datasets created for metaphor identification, however, this task has proven difficult due to the nebulous nature of metaphoricity. In this paper, we present a crowd-sourcing approach for the creation of a dataset for metaphor identification, that is able to rapidly achieve large coverage over the different usages of metaphor in a given corpus while maintaining high accuracy. We validate this methodology by creating a set of 2,500 manually annotated tweets in English, for which we achieve inter-annotator agreement scores over 0.8, which is higher than other reported results that did not limit the task. This methodology is based on the use of an existing classifier for metaphor in order to assist in the identification and the selection of the examples for annotation, in a way that reduces the cognitive load for annotators and enables quick and accurate annotation. We selected a corpus of both general language tweets and political tweets relating to Brexit and we compare the resulting corpus on these two domains. As a result of this work, we have published the first dataset of tweets annotated for metaphors, which we believe will be invaluable for the development, training and evaluation of approaches for metaphor identification in tweets

Identificación de Lenguaje Metafórico en textos argumentativos en inglés como lengua extranjera: un estudio de corpus

This article reports research investigating instances of linguistic metaphor in contextualized corpus data. Since the issue of metaphor identification in naturally-occurring data has been reason of current debate among cognitive and applied linguists, this paper focuses particularly on the process of identification of this type of language in corpus data and proposes a combined procedure for metaphor identification. The findings inform about the presence and word class of metaphorical language in the argumentative writing of EFL university students. Implications and directions for future research are highlighted.Este artículo reporta un estudio de instancias de lenguaje metafórico en datos contextualizados enmarcados en la lingüística del corpus. Dado que el problema de la identificación del lenguaje metafórico se ha constituido como causa de debate entre estudiosos de la lingüística cognitiva y la lingüística aplicada, este artículo se enfoca principalmente en los procesos de identificación de este tipo de lenguaje en datos auténticos de corpus, y propone un procedimiento combinado aplicable a este tipo de análisis. Los resultados informan acerca de la presencia del lenguaje metafórico y su clasificación gramatical en textos argumentativos escritos por estudiantes universitarios de inglés como lengua extranjera. El artículo discute las implicaciones de este estudio y propone posibles direcciones para futuras investigacione