Using WordNet and SUMO to Determine Source Domains of Conceptual Metaphors

In previous work by Ahrens et al. (2003) and Chung et al. (2003a, 2003b), the extraction of conceptual metaphors was carried out based on prototypicality. Based on this view, the most prototypical mappings of source to target domains in the corpora help determining the Mapping Principle of the conceptual metaphors (Ahrens 2002). However, this approach is limited in the aspect that the identification of source domains must be manually determined. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to suggest a way to reduce the manual work required for the determination of the source domain as well as to operationalize the steps to define different source domains. This paper incorporates the WordNet lexical representation and SUMO ontology in the identification of the related nodes to a group of linguistics expressions. The lexicons in the WordNet and SUMO are linked through works such as Niles and Pease (2003).