A Study on Metaphors in Idioms Based on Chinese Idiom Knowledge Base

Abstract

In Chinese language, idioms are an essential part of its vocabulary and used in everyday expression. People like to use idioms for their power of expression, rhetoric skill and special effect, which are mainly created by the metaphors in most of the idioms. This paper introduces a tentative research on the idioms with metaphors based on the Chinese Idiom Knowledge Base(CIKB) by the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University (ICL/PKU), in which the author expects to provide due help to research and applications on this topic. We believe that research as such will have benefit on NLP tasks like automatic metaphor recognition and processing, semantic role labeling etc. On the other hand, our work may also contribute to lexicography, Chinese linguistics study and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.