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The Hamburg Metaphor Database project: issues in resource creation

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Abstract

This paper concerns metaphor resource creation. It provides an account of methods used, problems discovered, and insights gained at the Hamburg Metaphor Database project, intended to inform similar resource creation initiatives, as well as future metaphor processing algorithms. After introducing the project, the theoretical underpinnings that motivate the subdivision of represented information into a conceptual and a lexical level are laid out. The acquisition of metaphor attestations from electronic corpora is explained, and annotation practices as well as database contents are evaluated. The paper concludes with an overview of related projects and an outline of possible future work.

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Notes

  1. http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/metaphern/index_en.html [24 August, 2007].

  2. Similar ideas have been expressed previously, e.g. by Reddy (1979), or the German linguist Harald Weinrich.

  3. Available at http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ [August 27, 2007].

  4. The author and annotator of the previous study (Reining 2006).

  5. The author of this paper.

  6. κ is sometimes provided for single categories (e.g. Markert and Nissim 2006), by collapsing all categories but one into a meta-category. This of course suffers from the same limitations as κ in general.

  7. The annotator was the author of this article.

  8. http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/ jab/ATT-Meta/Databank [May 20, 2008].

  9. A list of conceptual mappings is available at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/attmeta/DatabankDCA/ [September 5, 2007].

Abbreviations

EWN:

EuroWordNet

Fr.:

French

Ge.:

German

HMD:

Hamburg Metaphor Database

MML:

Master Metaphor List

MI:

Mutual Information

NLP:

Natural Language Processing

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a fellowship within the Postdoc-Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Preliminary versions of this paper were discussed at the ROLAP meeting, Princeton University, 1 May 2007, and at the NTL meeting, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, 8 September 2007. Wolfgang Settekorn has supported the Hamburg Metaphor Database by periodically assigning student assistants to it. Carina Eilts and Astrid Reining annotated the largest part of the HMD entries. I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for useful comments.

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    Birte Lönneker-Rodman

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Lönneker-Rodman, B. The Hamburg Metaphor Database project: issues in resource creation. Lang Resources & Evaluation 42, 293–318 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-008-9073-9

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