Using a corpus-based approach, this paper analyzes figurative language through observing the Chinese five elements (五 行 ) of 金 ‘metal,’ 木 ‘wood,’ 水 ‘water,’ 火 ‘fire’ and 土 ‘earth.’ This work found that there are at least two types of figurative language in Mandarin Chinese – one of which occurs at the morphosyntactic level and the other occurs during the mappings between two domains (between th...

Figurative language such as irony, sarcasm, and metaphor is considered a significant challenge in sentiment analysis. These figurative devices can sculpt the affect of an utterance and test the limits of sentiment analysis of supposedly literal texts. We explore the effect of figurative language on sentiment analysis. We incorporate the figurative language indicators into the sentiment analysis...

Based on twelve in-depth interviews at a battered women’s support center in Colima, Mexico in 1996, the following paper is an analysis of the figurative language used by battered women at different points of group therapy. This research compares the type of metaphors and similes used by participants at the beginning of the therapeutic process with those used by participants at the end of the sa...

The DsUniPi team participated in the SemEval 2015 Task#11: Sentiment Analysis of Figurative Language in Twitter. The proposed approach employs syntactical and morphological features, which indicate sentiment polarity in both figurative and non-figurative tweets. These features were combined with others that indicate presence of figurative language in order to predict a fine-grained sentiment sc...

Figurative language represents one of the most difficult tasks regarding natural language processing. Unlike literal language, figurative language takes advantage of linguistic devices such as irony, humor, sarcasm, metaphor, analogy, and so on, in order to communicate indirect meanings which, usually, are not interpretable by simply decoding syntactic or semantic information. Rather, figurativ...

This paper proposes a technique to create figurative relationships using Mikolov et al.’s word vectors. Drawing on existing work on figurative language, we start with a pair of words and use the intersection of word vector similarity sets to blend the distinct semantic spaces of the two words. We conduct preliminary quantitative and qualitative observations to compare the use of this novel inte...

Despite their apparent arbitrary nature, numerous figurative idioms can in fact be taught and learned in an insightful way, as opposed to random and blind memorisation. Controlled experiments in recent years have shown, for example, that learners’ recall of L2 figurative idioms is facilitated by the explicit use of imagery in the presentation stage. This imagery technique can only be fruitful t...

Automated processing of clinical texts is commonly faced with various less exposed, and not so regularly discussed linguistically complex problems that need to be addressed. One of these issues concerns the usage of figurative language. Figurative language implies the use of words that go beyond their ordinary meaning, a linguistically complex and challenging problem and also a problem that cau...

Using cross-modal priming, we investigated the processing of idioms in non-native listeners in varying experimental contexts. As idiomatic processing models have presented evidence for an idiomatic mode of processing that can be activated for non-native speakers in highly figurative contexts (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), this experiment revisits those claims while also examining access to figurative m...

Although the left hemisphere is critical for language, clinical, behavioral, and neuroimaging research suggest that the right hemisphere also contributes to language comprehension. In particular, research has suggested that figurative language may be one type of language that preferentially engages right hemisphere regions. However, there is disagreement about whether these regions within the r...