Metaphor Recognition: Chmeta, a Pattern‐based System

Abstract

Metaphor recognition presents a computational challenge, in part due to metaphoric deviation from literal thinking, and also because of a metaphor's various linguistic expressions. This article forwards a new computational method, an integrated treatment of metaphor recognition from the computational perspective, which recent related studies have not entirely addressed. The authors differentiate metaphor recognition from complex metaphor inference and interpretation employing psychological clues. To accomplish this, we have developed a formalized system of metaphorical expression in metaphor role dependency schema, which specifically defines, classifies, and quantifies metaphorical anomalies, building a computable classification system for metaphors (incorporating 32 major patterns of metaphorical expressions) by providing a strategy to locate potential metaphorical anomalies in a target input sentence through a pattern recognition method and a metaphor components' tagging approach. This metaphor recognition and tagging system is named and implemented as "CHMeta." Experiment results support the validity and efficiency of this metaphor recognition system. Compared with most metaphor computation systems, which work mainly on a few examples, this system classifies major metaphorical expressions from a computational perspective and is able to recognize a variety of different kinds of metaphors, including nested ones. Thus, this is the first integrated work in computable classification, recognition, and tagging of large-scale metaphors in Chinese.

What is a metaphorical collocation?

“…Yet, these are clearly idiomatic expressions. Yang, Zhou, Ding, Chen, and Shi (2009) reported on using CHMeta, a metaphor recognition system, and in their work refer to metaphorical collocations, stating that "CHMeta also failed on some of the conventional collocational metaphors because some conventional metaphorical collocations were included in the corpus data". They exemplify this with the collocation "save time", calling it a "dead metaphor" that has in fact become daily language and is no longer perceived as a metaphor.…”