Conversational Metaphors in Use: Exploring the Contrast between Technical and Everyday Notions of Metaphor

Much computational work has been done on identifying and interpreting the meaning of metaphors, but little work has been done on understanding the motivation behind the use of metaphor. To computationally model discourse and social positioning in metaphor, we need a corpus annotated with metaphors relevant to speaker intentions. This paper reports a corpus study as a first step towards computational work on social and discourse functions of metaphor. We use Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to annotate data from three web discussion forums covering distinct domains. We then compare these to annotations from our own annotation scheme which distinguish levels of metaphor with the labels: nonliteral, conventionalized, and literal. Our hope is that this work raises questions about what new work needs to be done in order to address the question of how metaphors are used to achieve social goals in interaction.