In this paper, we present approaches for the automated extraction and disambiguation of a part of the stylistic device Vossian Antonomasia (VA), namely the target entity that is described by the expression. We model the problem as a coreference resolution task and a question answering task and also combine both tasks. To tackle these tasks, we utilize state-of-the-art models in these areas. In addition, we visualize the connection between the source and target entities of VA in a web demo to get a deeper understanding of the interaction of entities used in VA expressions.

Attributing a particular property to a person by naming another person, who is typically wellknown for the respective property, is called a Vossian Antonomasia (VA). This subtpye of metonymy, which overlaps with metaphor, has a specific syntax and is especially frequent in journalistic texts. While identifying Vossian Antonomasia is of particular interest in the study of stylistics, it is also a source of errors in relation and fact extraction as an explicitly mentioned entity occurs only metaphorically and should not be associated with respective contexts. Despite rather simple syntactic variations, the automatic extraction of VA was never addressed as yet since it requires a deeper semantic understanding of mentioned entities and underlying relations. In this paper, we propose a first method for the extraction of VAs that works completely automatically. Our approaches use named entity recognition, distant supervision based on Wikidata, and a bi-directional LSTM for postprocessing. The evaluation on 1.8 million articles of the New York Times corpus shows that our approach significantly outperforms the only existing semi-automatic approach for VA identification by more than 30 percentage points in precision.