Metaphor Identification Using Verb and Noun Clustering

We present a novel approach to automatic metaphor identification in unrestricted text. Starting from a small seed set of manually annotated metaphorical expressions, the system is capable of harvesting a large number of metaphors of similar syntactic structure from a corpus. Our method is distinguished from previous work in that it does not employ any hand-crafted knowledge, other than the initial seed set, but, in contrast, captures metaphoricity by means of verb and noun clustering. Being the first to employ unsupervised methods for metaphor identification, our system operates with the precision of 0.79.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Ekaterina Shutova, Lin Sun, Anna Korhonen
• Keywords: Automatic Metaphor Identification, COLING 2010, Computational Linguistics, Metaphor Identification, Similar Syntactic Structure