Enhancing Rhetorical Figure Annotation: An Ontology-Based Web Application with RAG Integration

Ramona Kühn, Jelena Mitrović, Michael Granitzer


Abstract
Rhetorical figures play an important role in our communication. They are used to convey subtle, implicit meaning, or to emphasize statements. We notice them in hate speech, fake news, and propaganda. By improving the systems for computational detection of rhetorical figures, we can also improve tasks such as hate speech and fake news detection, sentiment analysis, opinion mining, or argument mining. Unfortunately, there is a lack of annotated data, as well as qualified annotators that would help us build large corpora to train machine learning models for the detection of rhetorical figures. The situation is particularly difficult in languages other than English, and for rhetorical figures other than metaphor, sarcasm, and irony. To overcome this issue, we develop a web application called “Find your Figure” that facilitates the identification and annotation of German rhetorical figures. The application is based on the German Rhetorical ontology GRhOOT which we have specially adapted for this purpose. In addition, we improve the user experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). In this paper, we present the restructuring of the ontology, the development of the web application, and the built-in RAG pipeline. We also identify the optimal RAG settings for our application. Our approach is one of the first to practically use rhetorical ontologies in combination with RAG and shows promising results.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.587
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8774–8786
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.587/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ramona Kühn, Jelena Mitrović, and Michael Granitzer. 2025. Enhancing Rhetorical Figure Annotation: An Ontology-Based Web Application with RAG Integration. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8774–8786, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Rhetorical Figure Annotation: An Ontology-Based Web Application with RAG Integration (Kühn et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.587.pdf