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Background Semantic Information Improves Verbal Metaphor Identification

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Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13029))

Abstract

Metaphor is frequently applied in human language. In natural language processing field, metaphor identification has long been studied. In this work, we focus on the verbal metaphor identification. Based on the observation that verbal metaphor occurs on the iteration between the verb and its subject/object, we propose to leverage the abundant information of the sentences containing the verb, named as background semantic information. We devise to leverage the background knowledge to improve verbal metaphor identification, and obtain a state-of-the-art performance in two public verbal metaphor identification datasets, MOH_X and Trofi. Further experiment analyses verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://nlp.stanford.edu/data/WestburyLab.wikicorp.201004.txt.bz2.

  2. 2.

    Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK, http://www.nltk.org/).

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/biplab-iitb/practNLPTools.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the reviewers for their valuable comments. This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2020AAA0106602).

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Correspondence to Dongyan Zhao .

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Qin, W., Zhao, D. (2021). Background Semantic Information Improves Verbal Metaphor Identification. In: Wang, L., Feng, Y., Hong, Y., He, R. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13029. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88483-3_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88483-3_22

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