Abstract
The reliable automated identification of metaphors still remains a challenge in metaphor research due to ambiguity between semantic and contextual interpretation of individual lexical items. In this article, we describe a novel approach to metaphor identification which is based on three intersecting methods: imageability, topic chaining, and semantic clustering. Our hypothesis is that metaphors are likely to use highly imageable words that do not generally have a topical or semantic association with the surrounding context. Our method is thus the following: (1) identify the highly imageable portions of a paragraph, using psycholinguistic measures of imageability, (2) exclude imageability peaks that are part of a topic chain, and (3) exclude imageability peaks that show a semantic relationship to the main topics. We are currently working towards fully automating this method for a number of languages.
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Broadwell, G.A. et al. (2013). Using Imageability and Topic Chaining to Locate Metaphors in Linguistic Corpora. In: Greenberg, A.M., Kennedy, W.G., Bos, N.D. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction. SBP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7812. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37210-0_12
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