@inproceedings{suen-etal-2026-mapping,
title = "Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time",
author = "Suen, Sidney and
Mao, Rui and
Kwok, Kenneth and
Cambria, Erik",
editor = "Piperidis, Stelios and
Bel, N{\'u}ria and
van den Heuvel, Henk and
Ide, Nancy and
Krek, Simon and
Toral, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
month = may,
year = "2026",
address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.894/",
doi = "10.63317/4dzoudvxnqwm",
pages = "11427--11438",
abstract = "Cognitive metaphors provide a lens for understanding how societies construct and negotiate ideas, including liberty discourse. This study explores conceptual metaphors in liberty discourse by applying a scalable, corpus-driven approach for cognitive analysis. A curated list of thematic keywords related to liberty topics is used to extract relevant sentences from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. MetaPro, a framework grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, processes these sentences to identify metaphorical mappings at scale. Embedding visualizations and frequency counts were applied to both corpora; in COHA, line graphs captured temporal shifts in metaphor usage across time, while in NOW, two-dimensional heatmaps highlighted spatial variation across countries. Selected example phrases illustrate how metaphorical mappings extend across diverse issues and domains. Thus, metaphor distributions and shifts provide a useful empirical lens for identifying changing thematic concerns in liberty discourse, offering a scalable, cognitively grounded method for cultural analysis across time and space. This demonstrates the value of computational methods for large-scale culture research."
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<abstract>Cognitive metaphors provide a lens for understanding how societies construct and negotiate ideas, including liberty discourse. This study explores conceptual metaphors in liberty discourse by applying a scalable, corpus-driven approach for cognitive analysis. A curated list of thematic keywords related to liberty topics is used to extract relevant sentences from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. MetaPro, a framework grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, processes these sentences to identify metaphorical mappings at scale. Embedding visualizations and frequency counts were applied to both corpora; in COHA, line graphs captured temporal shifts in metaphor usage across time, while in NOW, two-dimensional heatmaps highlighted spatial variation across countries. Selected example phrases illustrate how metaphorical mappings extend across diverse issues and domains. Thus, metaphor distributions and shifts provide a useful empirical lens for identifying changing thematic concerns in liberty discourse, offering a scalable, cognitively grounded method for cultural analysis across time and space. This demonstrates the value of computational methods for large-scale culture research.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time
%A Suen, Sidney
%A Mao, Rui
%A Kwok, Kenneth
%A Cambria, Erik
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F suen-etal-2026-mapping
%X Cognitive metaphors provide a lens for understanding how societies construct and negotiate ideas, including liberty discourse. This study explores conceptual metaphors in liberty discourse by applying a scalable, corpus-driven approach for cognitive analysis. A curated list of thematic keywords related to liberty topics is used to extract relevant sentences from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the News on the Web (NOW) corpus. MetaPro, a framework grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, processes these sentences to identify metaphorical mappings at scale. Embedding visualizations and frequency counts were applied to both corpora; in COHA, line graphs captured temporal shifts in metaphor usage across time, while in NOW, two-dimensional heatmaps highlighted spatial variation across countries. Selected example phrases illustrate how metaphorical mappings extend across diverse issues and domains. Thus, metaphor distributions and shifts provide a useful empirical lens for identifying changing thematic concerns in liberty discourse, offering a scalable, cognitively grounded method for cultural analysis across time and space. This demonstrates the value of computational methods for large-scale culture research.
%R 10.63317/4dzoudvxnqwm
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.894/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/4dzoudvxnqwm
%P 11427-11438
Markdown (Informal)
[Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.894/) (Suen et al., LREC 2026)
ACL
- Sidney Suen, Rui Mao, Kenneth Kwok, and Erik Cambria. 2026. Mapping Liberty Metaphors across Cultures and Time. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 11427–11438, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.