Challenges in Finding Metaphorical Connections

Katy Gero, Lydia Chilton


Abstract
Poetry is known for its novel expression using figurative language. We introduce a writing task that contains the essential challenges of generating meaningful figurative language and can be evaluated. We investigate how to find metaphorical connections between abstract themes and concrete domains by asking people to write four-line poems on a given metaphor, such as “death is a rose” or “anger is wood”. We find that only 21% of poems successfully make a metaphorical connection. We present five alternate ways people respond to the prompt and release our dataset of 100 categorized poems. We suggest opportunities for computational approaches.
Anthology ID:
W18-0901
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Beata Beigman Klebanov, Ekaterina Shutova, Patricia Lichtenstein, Smaranda Muresan, Chee Wee
Venue:
Fig-Lang
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–6
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0901
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-0901
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Katy Gero and Lydia Chilton. 2018. Challenges in Finding Metaphorical Connections. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing, pages 1–6, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Challenges in Finding Metaphorical Connections (Gero & Chilton, Fig-Lang 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-0901.pdf
Code
 kgero/metaphorical-connections
Data
Metaphorical Connections