Event Detection from Blogs Using Large Scale Analysis of Metaphorical Usage

Metaphors shape the way people think, decide, and act. We hypothesize that large-scale variations in metaphor usage in blogs can be used as an indicator of societal events. To this end, we use metaphor analysis on a massive scale to study blogs in Latin America over a period ranging from 2000-2015, with most of our data occurring within a nine-year period. Using co-clustering, we form groups of similar behaving metaphors for Argentina, Ecuador, Mexico, and Venezuela and characterize overrepresented as well as underrepresented metaphors for specific locations. We then focus on the metaphor’s potential relation to events by studying the tobacco tax increase in Mexico from 2009-2011. We study correspondences between changes in metaphor frequency with event occurrences, as well as the effect of temporal scaling of data windows on the frequency relationship between metaphors and events.