Figurative, Polysemous, Conventional: Designing a Dataset of Regular Metaphor

Anna Temerko, Pablo Gamallo, Marcos Garcia


Abstract
Metaphor, a figure of speech and a cognitive device, offers a powerful way to explain one conceptual domain in terms of another. Particularly successful metaphorical mappings are conventionalized through frequent use and lose their creative quality. They become sense extensions of polysemous words. Our dataset project captures such metaphors with ten regular polysemy patterns that manifest repetitively in the meaning structures of English words. Regular metaphor, unlike its counterpart regular metonymy, has not previously received a dedicated dataset, and we intend to close this gap. The dataset under construction features naturalistic sentences extracted from a general language corpus and is manually annotated with sense labels for metaphorically extended polysemes. Its intended use is to support linguistic, cognitive, and computational investigations into patterns of meaning in polysemy, while accounting for its complexity, regularity, continuity, and heterogeneity. We see neural language models as an excellent experimental ground for such research because they are able to show both distributional (continuous) and symbolic (discrete) behavior in language processing and representation. In this paper, we reflect on how these systems tally.
Anthology ID:
2026.slide-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Erhard Hinrichs, Joakim Nivre, Petya Osenova, James Pustejovsky, Claus Zinn
Venues:
SLiDE | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
202–211
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-slide-18
DOI:
10.63317/5b4647to68fk
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anna Temerko, Pablo Gamallo, and Marcos Garcia. 2026. Figurative, Polysemous, Conventional: Designing a Dataset of Regular Metaphor. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Structured Linguistic Data and Evaluation (SLiDE), pages 202–211, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Figurative, Polysemous, Conventional: Designing a Dataset of Regular Metaphor (Temerko et al., SLiDE 2026)
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