Harder than Finding the Lost Sheep? Towards Automatically Suggesting Deliberate Metaphor Annotations in German Sermons

Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Stefanie Dipper


Abstract
Automatic metaphor detection so far has largely focused on English data annotated for all kinds of metaphors including ubiquitous conventionalized ones. In this paper, we focus on deliberate metaphors in German sermons, i.e., metaphors that are used with a specific communicative goal. This task is harder because there is less training data available, and deliberate metaphors are very rare. Our goal is to support human annotators with automatically generated suggestions, so we strive above all for high recall. Using multilingual transfer learning based on various metaphor datasets and different transformer models, the highest recall we achieve is .70 (precision .10). Our results suggest that larger context windows beyond the sentence level are not helpful and that adding in-domain data even when annotated with different guidelines and in a different language is beneficial.
Anthology ID:
2026.latechclfl-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Diego Alves, Yuri Bizzoni, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Janis Pagel, Stan Szpakowicz
Venues:
LaTeCH-CLfL | WS
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
164–175
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ronja Laarmann-Quante and Stefanie Dipper. 2026. Harder than Finding the Lost Sheep? Towards Automatically Suggesting Deliberate Metaphor Annotations in German Sermons. In Proceedings of the 10th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature 2026, pages 164–175, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Harder than Finding the Lost Sheep? Towards Automatically Suggesting Deliberate Metaphor Annotations in German Sermons (Laarmann-Quante & Dipper, LaTeCH-CLfL 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.latechclfl-1.16.pdf
Supplementarymaterial:
 2026.latechclfl-1.16.SupplementaryMaterial.txt