Brighter than Gold: Figurative Language in User Generated Comparisons

Comparisons are common linguistic devices used to indicate the likeness of two things. Often, this likeness is not meant in the literal sense—for example, “I slept like a log” does not imply that logs actually sleep. In this paper we propose a computational study of figurative comparisons, or similes. Our starting point is a new large dataset of comparisons extracted from product reviews and annotated for figurativeness. We use this dataset to characterize figurative language in naturally occurring comparisons and reveal linguistic patterns indicative of this phenomenon. We operationalize these insights and apply them to a new task with high relevance to text understanding: distinguishing between figurative and literal comparisons. Finally, we apply this framework to explore the social context in which figurative language is produced, showing that similes are more likely to accompany opinions showing extreme sentiment, and that they are uncommon in reviews deemed helpful.