The Hamburg Metaphor Database project: issues in resource creation

This paper concerns metaphor resource creation. It provides an account of methods used, problems discovered, and insights gained at the Hamburg Metaphor Database project, intended to inform similar resource creation initiatives, as well as future metaphor processing algorithms. After introducing the project, the theoretical underpinnings that motivate the subdivision of represented information into a conceptual and a lexical level are laid out. The acquisition of metaphor attestations from electronic corpora is explained, and annotation practices as well as database contents are evaluated. The paper concludes with an overview of related projects and an outline of possible future work.