Literal and Metaphorical Synonymyous Expressions in Discourse
We created a series of resources containing corpus sentences, translations and metaphoricity ratings for a selection of synonymous literal and metaphorical verb-object expressions, such as suggest an idea vs. float an idea.- Discourse-Met-Lit
This dataset contains 1,000 corpus-extracted discourses for which crowdsourced annotators provided (1) graded and binary judgements on whether they perceived the discourses as more metaphorical or more literal; (2) binary judgements on the choice between a synonymous pair of a literal and a metaphorical expression following the discourses in (1); and (3) lexical terms which triggered their binary decisions in (1). The judgements were collected and analysed within two studies in various ways.
- VOLIMET
We created a parallel corpus of English–German and English–French sentences containing gold standard alignments of paraphrased metaphorical and literal uses of verb-object (VO) pairs. The corpus provides insights on the translation of metaphorical VO pairs and their corresponding literal paraphrases from the source language (SL) English to the target languages (TL) French and German.
- Met-Lit-Contrast
We enlarged the English part of VOLIMET by automatically extracting all available English sentences containing the VOs from the ENCOW corpus (ENglish COrpora from the Web, cf. Schäfer and Bildhauer, 2012), where the object is the direct object of the verb. The enlarged monolingual corpus contains approx. 2 million sentences.
References:
Prisca Piccirilli, Alexander Fraser, Sabine Schulte im Walde (2024)
VOLIMET: A Parallel Corpus of Literal and Metaphorical Verb-Object Pairs for English-German and English-French
In: Proceedings of the 13th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM). Mexico City, Mexico.
Prisca Piccirilli, Alexander Fraser, Sabine Schulte im Walde (2026)
Floating or Suggesting Ideas? A Large-Scale Contrastive Analysis of Metaphorical and Literal Verb-Object Constructions
In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL). Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
Prisca Piccirilli, Sabine Schulte im Walde (2021)
Contextual Choice between Synonymous Pairs of Metaphorical and Literal Expressions: An Empirical Study and Novel Dataset to tackle or to address the question
In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Integrating Perspectives on Discourse Annotation (DiscAnn). Tübingen, Germany.
Prisca Piccirilli, Sabine Schulte im Walde (2022)
Features of Perceived Metaphoricity on the Discourse Level: Abstractness and Emotionality
In: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). Marseille, France.