Guidelines for the Annotation of Deliberate Linguistic Metaphor (2024)

Abstract: This paper presents guidelines for the annotation of deliberate linguistic metaphor. Expressions that contribute to the same metaphorical image are annotated as a chain along with a semantically contrasting expression of the target domain, which helps to make the domain contrast inherent to metaphor more explicit. So far, a corpus of ten TEDx talks with a total of ca. 20k tokens has been annotated according to these guidelines. 1.35% of the tokens are deliberate metaphorical expressions according to our guidelines, which shows that our guidelines successfully identify a significantly higher proportion of deliberate metaphorical expressions than previous studies.

## introduction in conceptual metaphor theory @xcite , the idea of a conceptual metaphors refers to the understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another. this involves taking an expression from a literal, usually more concrete, source domain and transferring it onto a target domain in order to shape our understanding of this target domain concept in some way. this crossdomain mapping effects a transfer of properties of the source domain to the target domain, as the source domain is reinterpreted. such conceptual metaphors can be implemented in any of a number of ways, but one common medium for conceptual metaphors is language. linguistic metaphor is often associated with certain properties: there is usually some kind of semantic mismatch between certain words in a sentence, which triggers the reinterpretation of the metaphorically-used words. according to @xcite , such mismatches, which he calls 'exploitations', stem from a deliberate departure from an established pattern of normal word use. for instance, in example (1), the subject bodenschätze 'natural resources' (lit. 'ground-treasure'), is normally used with container expressions referring to soil or huge shipping containers, so referring to people's minds as containers deviates from the norm. as a consequence, bodenschätze is reinterpreted as the valuable content of minds, such as intelligence or creativity. there is a related notion that metaphoric expressions can be observed to stand out in their immediate context, that it will be surprising to find language pertaining to product packaging in the context of a poetry slam for instance, as in example (2), and this element of surprise can also trigger the reinterpretation of expressions that are intended metaphorically. in order to learn more about the linguistic dimensions of metaphor and the relationship between linguistic metaphors and their context, we annotate whole texts and will eventually expand our corpus to encompass a variety of text genres. previous annotation efforts that have covered the annotation of complete texts, most notably the vua metaphor corpus @xcite , often used guidelines oriented broadly towards the annotation of all kinds of metaphor, and accordingly their datasets consist mostly of conventionalized metaphors, of which speakers are mostly unaware and which don't serve a particular discoursecommunicative purpose. in contrast, our guidelines are focussed more squarely on deliberate metaphors in the sense of @xcite , which play an important role in a discourse and of which speakers and listeners are likely aware. the contributions of this paper are: (i) annotation guidelines for identifying deliberate metaphor; (ii) an annotated corpus of tedx talks with 20k tokens, which is made freely available.1 ## related work the first work on the annotation of metaphors in texts comes from an interdisciplinary group of researchers who define a metaphor identification procedure (mip) to recognize metaphorically used expressions in texts @xcite . the mipvu guidelines went beyond mip by also taking into account explicit comparisons or similes @xcite . in both approaches, the annotator must first determine the contextual meaning of a word, i.e. the current meaning in the text, and then use a reference lexicon to check whether there is a 'more basic' literal meaning (e.g. a more concrete meaning). if the contextual meaning is in contrast to the literal meaning, but is at the same time in some way similar and can be understood in comparison to it, the word is labeled as 'mrw' (metaphor-related word). the guidelines are designed as to identify all metaphors, including conventionalized ones. @xcite annotated the vuamc (vu amsterdam metaphor corpus) according to mipvu. the corpus contains 190k words and consists of fragments from four registers of the bnc-baby corpus (academic texts, conversation, fiction, and news texts). 86% of the words are clearly non-metaphorical and 13% are clear mrws, and 1% are borderline cases. the highest proportion of mrws is found among prepositions. in different studies on inter-annotator agreement (iaa), @xcite achieved fleiss' 𝜅 between 0.70 and 0.96 (with texts in english and dutch). ## guidelines we are interested in deliberate metaphor in germanlanguage data. in most studies, deliberate mrws represent a very small proportion of all tokens, less than 0.3%. the study by @xcite clearly deviates from this with proportions of 4.86 and 6.83%, but it is unclear whether this is due, for example, to the open guidelines or to the text type or to the fact that the texts come from learners. our aim is to produce guidelines with specific criteria, offering supportive guidance for the annotators, so that the proportion of overlooked cases due to attention slips is minimized and we are able to identify more instances of deliberate mrws than has been the case in previous studies. our criteria, detailed in the following, are based on those for deliberate mrws in @xcite . deliberate an mrw is considered deliberate if the metaphorical image is new or if the mrw used for an known metaphorical image is unusual and innovative. alternatively, the mrw can be deliberate because it is marked in some way, e.g. if it occurs in a construction that is normally used in the active voice but now occurs in the passive voice, if the mrw is typographically emphasized, e.g., by italics or quotation marks, or if it stands out because it also appears in the title of the text. for instance, example (3) contains a well-known metaphor, ein strauß an forderungen 'a bouquet of demands'. however, this established metaphor is expanded and modified by the adjective bunt 'colorful' and the verb binden 'to bind', so we consider it a deliberate metaphor. the label grey area is used when an mrw shows characteristics of both deliberate and conventionalized metaphors. revitalized a subset of conventionalized expressions is also relevant here, namely revitalized usages: a conventionalized mrw can appear in a new light in a particular context, e.g. when a deliberate mrw that refers to the same image occurs in the immediate vicinity, so that the conventionalized expression could plausibly have been chosen deliberately rather than arbitrarily or a listener might plausibly perceive it in this way. the otherwise conventionalized expression is thus considered 'revived' or revitalized. anchor usually, the annotation process begins when an annotator, in the course of reading through a text, notices some unusual or conspicuous combination of words, which impression is often the result of a domain clash or a kind of semantic incompatibility between them. one of the words, corresponding to the source domain, then needs to be re-interpreted metaphorically, while the other, corresponding to the target domain, is taken literally. we label this second expression the 'anchor', as this is the expression that 'anchors' the metaphorical image in reality. in example (3) above, the anchor is forderungen 'demands', because this is the expression that is intended literally -the statement is ultimately really about 'demands' of some kind and not flowers. in addition, we mark flags @xcite ) indicating a comparison, e.g. expressions such as wie 'like' or sozusagen 'so to speak'. ## data and results corpus the current corpus consists of the transcriptions of a total of ten tedx talks which were given in german on a range of different topics. four of the texts have been doubly annotated and curated (see below). the texts are subject to licenses that permit free redistribution.5 the corpus contains 20k tokens (averaging 1979.4 ±481.7 tokens per document). 1.35% of the tokens are deliberate metaphorical expressions, which shows that our guidelines successfully identify a significantly higher proportion of deliberate mrws than previous studies. of course, we cannot say what part the text type -tedx talks -has in this. future work with annotations of other text types will have to show this. inter-annotator agreement our validation corpus consists of four talks from the tedx series. these texts were doubly annotated in their entirety according to our guidelines by two of the authors. to evaluate the reliability of the annotations, we employ the 𝛾 agreement measure @xcite , specifically the implementation of @xcite . this is a holistic agreement measure that determines the alignment between annotated units jointly with the measurement of disagreements in categorization. we use a dissimilarity measure that takes into account the conceptual similarity between the category labels. for instance, metaphors that are labeled 'deliberate' can be considered more similar to those labeled 'grey area' than 'anchor'. as such, our dissimilarity measure will consider disagreement between 'deliberate' and 'grey area' to be less than between 'deliberate' and 'anchor'. the 𝛾 statistic, calculated on these data with the parameters described above is 0.35, 0.43, 0.49 and 0.56 for each of the four evaluation texts, respectively. especially considering the complexity of the phenomenon itself and the annotation scheme, these are promising results, which we expect could be improved in the future with further refinement of the annotation guidelines.