Generating Apt Metaphor Ideas for Pictorial Advertisements

Pictorial metaphor is a popular way of expression in creative advertising. It attributes certain desirable quality to the advertised product. We adopt a general twostage computational approach in order to generate apt metaphor ideas for pictorial advertisements. The first stage looks for concepts which have high imageability and the selling premise as one of their prototypical properties. The second stage evaluates the aptness of the candidate vehicles (found in the first stage) in regard to four metrics, including affect polarity, salience, secondary attributes and similarity with tenor. These four metrics are conceived based on the general characteristics of metaphor and its specialty in advertisements. We developed a knowledge extraction method for the first stage and utilized an affect lexicon and two semantic relatedness measures to implement the aptness metrics of the second stage. The capacity of our computer program is demonstrated in a task of reproducing the pictorial metaphor ideas used in three real advertisements. All the three original metaphors were replicated, as well as a few other vehicles recommended, which, we consider, would make effective advertisements as well.